Jihad Factories Function As Schools in Pakistan

Hyper-religiosity in educational systems has produced militant minds in Pakistani society. Regular schools have turned to a madrassa-like education style, resulting in children enthusiastically volunteering to be suicide bombers. This nouveau Pakistan must be recognized and diffused.

After independence, the influence of Jamaat-e-Islami shadowed overall youth institutions and stalled their progress. Generations post-1980 went further back in time because the military-mullah alliance needed readymade jihadis to fight their battles in India. Schools became jihad factories and ever since have been so.

Today when the Pakistani government is trying to save themselves from the snakes in their backyard they are confronted with the same venom they so liberally spread across Pakistan. As a result, children in Pakistan are wildly illiterate and have developed a ravenous appetite for perpetuating violence.

The elites and Pak Army staff have their children admitted to the best universities in the USA and Canada; they are schooled at British-style public or mission schools using the best curricula, unacquainted with the rest of Pakistan. But the children of ordinary citizens go to substandard schools focussed on memorizing religious texts without learning the meaning.

Educational competency or decline starts with schools. According to a survey, 77 percent of ten-year-olds in Pakistan cannot comprehend English, the country’s official language. A Unicef report reveals that 23 million children are out of school, and those who are enrolled in one struggle with reading, writing, and math. Their basic mental understanding and reasoning skills are miserably poor, making them perfect candidates to be recruited by terror outfits.

As poverty has gripped most of Pakistan, youth readily join militancy for money and paradise. Of course, Pakistan denies its hand in radicalizing children and the deteriorating education system. For them the budget allocation towards education is appropriate. But there are allegations against Pakistan by its creditors for spending way too much humanitarian money on the military. A huge chunk of the funds is devoted to military pensions, nuclear programs, military operations, and hidden expenditure which are not reflected in government budgets.

The alarming situation of tomorrow’s youth in Pakistan goes highly unnoticed when the country’s only focus is to be a terror sanctuary. No wonder Pakistan tops the list of out-of-school children worldwide. Children are subjected to a toxic political environment, and poverty, and are at the mercy of natural and manmade disasters without any relief. In Sindh alone, 20,000 schools were destroyed due to 2022 floods. Suffering from malnutrition, without shelter, food, or clean drinking water, education scores lowest on their agenda. The provincial government has declared it an ‘educational emergency’. To date, the federal government has not rehabilitated the flood victims or their schools.

As a whole, more than half of the country’s poor children are deprived of school education. The ruling elites have never paid attention to the education of children who instead of going to school work as laborers or fall into the hands of criminals in society. According to official data, 32 percent of children in Punjab, 44 percent in Sindh, 32 percent in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, and 47 percent in Balochistan do not go to school. On the other hand, the education rate of girls is much lower than that of boys in the country.

Ultimately, children often join jihadist groups who do not hesitate to use them as scapegoats in suicide attacks. If not that, attracted by free accommodation and food, poor parents enroll their wards in religious madrassas and completely lose their rights over their offspring. These are the only two options for an average Pakistani household.

If clerics and jihadists continue controlling the education system, Pakistan is looking at a National Emergency, not just an educational one.

Source: IFFRAS.ORG