afghanistanEvaluation Unit (areu) and sigar reveal a very different picture. Many of
these institutions are what are known in Pakistan as ‘ghost schools’, insti-
tutions that exist only on paper. Research has revealed that staff and pupil
numbers in many schools are a fraction of those officially claimed in the
Ministry of Education’s statistics, while teachers frequently fail to turn up
to class yet continue to draw their salaries. Furthermore, it is not possible
to judge advances in education or literacy merely by counting the number
of schools or pupils. To do so is like trying to estimate the number of liter-
ate people in a community by counting the books in the local library. Nor
do government statistics reveal anything about the quality of education
or teaching, let alone the availability of resources or the suitability of the
curriculum or textbooks.
Afghanistan’s state education and educational methodology is very
poor and remains rooted in archaic practices long abandoned by educa-
tionalists in other developing countries. Rote learning remains the basis
of teaching and the skill levels of teachers, from primary to tertiary level,
is inadequate. In rural areas, an individual only needs a sixth grade educa-
tion to qualify as a primary schoolteacher and few educators have ever
studied modern teaching practice. The government continues to perpetu-
ate a long-standing tradition in which pupils are required to complete, that
is to memorize, a single textbook, per subject, per annum. The state has
little control over the burgeoning private school sector, which is driven
by profit rather than academic excellence, or the thousands of madrasas
in Afghanistan. Mullahs continue to resist attempts by the government
to oversee their educational activities or to enforce a nationally approved
curriculum and very few have any formal teaching qualification.
There has been little attempt by the government to encourage
wider reading, let alone personal enquiry, experimentation or practical
experience. Educational materials and resources in many rural schools
are non-existent, and children and young people prefer to watch Hindi
movies or spend time on social media websites or the internet to reading
books. A number of ngos now publish good reading material for chil-
dren in Dari and Pushtu, and one project distributes small libraries to
rural schools. Yet according to a recent usaid report, despite more than
a decade of u.s. support for education, Afghan youth remain ‘disenfran-
chised, unskilled, uneducated, neglected – and most susceptible to joining
the insurgency’. 32 sigar too has criticized the lack of ‘visibility’ in the
Afghan education system, noting that it is almost impossible to know what
children are being taught or if these state institutions have been hijacked
by radical, anti-Western jihadists.