The state and education: The political economy of education development in Pakistan from 1958 to 1988

This study was undertaken as an inquiry into the educational development of Pakistan during the period 1958-1988. Its major focus is a political-economic analysis of educational policy-making, planning and implementation under three regimes. Its three main objectives are: (1) To demonstrate the central role of the state (via the policy elite and state institutions) in formulation, planning and implementation of educational policies and programs; (2) to explain the relative neglect of education across regimes, and, within the education sector, the relative neglect of primary/basic education; and (3) to compare and contrast the process of educational policy-making, planning and policy implementation under one civilian and two military regimes in Pakistan.;The study uses an analytic framework which was constructed by drawing the relevant strands from the state-centered approaches. The state-centered approaches assign the state, its policy elite and state institutions a predominant role in public policy formulation and policy choice. The relevant concepts and theories under these approaches are: the state interests, the state autonomy and the state capacity. These concepts and theories were used to construct the analytic framework. According to the framework, the state is relatively autonomous from societal pressures, and the state (via its policy elite and state institutions) pursues the state interests by employing the state capacity. In this framework, the societal interest groups play roles that range from marginal to non-existent.;By using the analytic framework, this study demonstrates that in Pakistan during 1958-1988, the state played a relatively autonomous role in policy formulation, planning and implementation in the education sector. It also demonstrates that the civil regime and the two military regimes accorded low priority to education compared to other sectors in their development policies and plans. Also, these regimes assigned a lower priority to primary/basic education than to higher and technical education. Under the civilian regime (1971-1977), the political elites, in collaboration with the civil bureaucracy, dominated the policy-making process, whereas under the two military regimes (1958-1969 and 1977-1988), the military and the civil bureaucracy were the two dominant policy actors.