| I thought this article was quite enlightening. |
A new research study released Tuesday refutes commonly accepted assertions about the popularity of madrassas in Pakistan. The report, titled "Religious School Enrollment in Pakistan: A look at the Data," is the first study to use publicly available and nationally representative data sources to examine the enrollment trends of Pakistani students at religious schools.Madrassas provide basic training to would-be Muslim clerics, teaching them how to read the Koran and lead daily and weekly prayers. Professor Asim Ijaz Khwaja of Harvard's Kennedy School of Government and co-authors Tahir Andrabi, Jishnu Das and Tristan Zajonc found that madrassas account for less than 1 percent of the total student enrollment in the country, with 200,000 children enrolled fulltime before 2001. They also concluded that there is no evidence of a dramatic increase in madrassa enrollment in recent years. These findings contradict many recent press accounts. For example, between March 2002 and July 2002, figures for madrassa enrollment cited in The Washington Post tripled from 500,000 to 1.5 million.
| WaPo said that? I knew we should have checked it out. |
According to the authors, enrollment in madrassas accounts for just 0.3 percent of all Pakistani children between ages 5 and 19. Since the overall school enrollment rate in this age group is 42 percent, this represents less than 0.7 percent of all Pakistani children attending school. Even in regions that border Afghanistan, where madrassa enrollment is relatively high, it is less than 7.5 percent of all enrolled children. The authors point out that the real revolution in the Pakistani educational landscape in recent years has been the rise of affordable and mainstream private schools. Even among the less than 1 percent of families who have children enrolled in madrassas, more than 75 percent send their other children to private and public schools.
According to this study, total primary enrollment -- grades 1-5 -- in public and private schools stood at 17.4 million in 2003. In terms of proportions of the enrolled population, the top 10 districts out of a total of 101 lie in the Pashtun belt on the western border of Afghanistan. Outside the Pashtun belt, madrassa enrollment is thinly, but evenly, spread across the rest of the country. Among the households covered by this team's 2003 census, the researchers found the same pattern. "The prevailing hypothesis that households do not have other schooling options and thus send their children to religious schools, or that households are religiously minded and thus choose madrassas over private and public schools is not supported by the data," the researchers note. "There is weak evidence to support the hypothesis that poorer and less-educated families are more likely to send a child to a madrassa, and somewhat stronger findings that poor children in settlements without a school use madrassas more often."