 Good morning ladies and gentlemen, thanks for joining us this morning. My name is Moid Yusuf. I direct the South Asia program here at USIP. Today's panel is actually special for a couple of reasons, for me at least, one that it's based on a very recent USIP publication authored by Dr. Madhya Afzal to my left, looking at attitudes of Pakistani public school children and the links with the Pakistani textbooks. The other is that we talk so much about security in this town, and everything about Pakistan is security. We start from terrorism and end at terrorism. And thus I think to broaden the discussion and talk about things that quite honestly are much more important to Pakistanis themselves, and things that will probably make or break Pakistan much more than the tactical things we talk about, I think makes this very important. We've got a very eminent panel here who will talk about issues of education. Dr. Madhya Afzal, who I'll just introduce to you in a second, will talk about her report essentially, so the summary of the findings and draw the link between textbooks and how Pakistan you think. We've got Dr. Rebecca Fox, who has been in the field of education for over three decades now, and will bring the comparative perspective here to see how other countries in the world do this. Because there's a lot of conversation, and Madhya will cover this, about textbooks being a serious problem in terms of creating the mindsets that lead to not only problematic viewpoints, but also violence in some ways. Dr. Fox will also talk about the importance of teacher training and the link between teachers and how they teach, and what that does to students. And finally to my right, Michael Kugelman, a good friend of mine from the Woodrow Wilson Center, will be talking more broadly about the youth's bulge in Pakistan, demographic trends, and how the Pakistani state can or cannot or may or may not be able to cater to the needs of the Pakistani youth when it comes to education. They'll speak for about 15 minutes each. After that, we'll open up for a discussion. So I encourage you to ask questions and make any comments that you may have. The report is somewhere here, I promise you, right at the back. So if any of you are interested, please do grab a copy as you leave. Let me very quickly introduce the three panelists. And then we'll go in the order of Dr. Madia Afzal, Dr. Rebecca Fox, and Michael Kugelman. Dr. Afzal is an assistant professor at the University of Maryland School of Public Policy, also a non-resident fellow at the Brookings Institution, writes very regularly for the Pakistani and international press, and was also named, and I'm going to massacre this, the Los Pazio de la Politica's list of top 100 global thinkers of 2013 for her research on education in Pakistan, some of which is reflected in this report. Dr. Rebecca Fox is the professor of education and the academic program coordinator of the Advanced Studies in Teaching and Learning program in the College of Education and Human Development at George Mason University. I got that right. And has been in the field of education for over 30 years, including interaction with teachers and teacher trainings in Pakistan. She's the author of over 45 publications, including a co-authored book. Michael is a senior program associate for South and Central Asia, and Southeast Asia at the Woodrow Wilson Center, and oversees research, programming, and publications in the region for Woodrow Wilson. He's most recently worked on Pakistan's 2013 elections, India-Pakistan, and US-Pakistan, and US-India relations, but has also edited a book, I believe, a couple of years ago on the demographic dividend and the youth bulge in Pakistan, and probably the single most prolific writer in the Washington DC think tank circuit. He fills up my inbox more than I really want him to, but in any case, that's a compliment. So, Madhya, if you want to take it out. Great. Thank you. So I will start by sort of presenting the main findings of this report on education and attitudes in Pakistan. And before I start off, the conventional wisdom on this topic is that more education is correlated with better attitudes, if you will. So more tolerance, less radicalism. But this conventional wisdom has been debunked by empirical evidence. So what I'm doing here is taking a look inside the black box of schooling in Pakistan, if you will, at the content of the curriculum and what you're learning and how you're learning, and looking at that and how that affects attitudes. So that's sort of what the report is about. I'm looking at sort of a set of attitudes, perceptions of terrorism, the United States, India, and minorities, OK? So here you see a couple of pictures from the fieldwork that I did. And for good measure, I brought the textbooks that I looked at as well. All right. So why do attitudes matter? Why do we care? Well, first of all, as I said, the attitudes I'm talking about are an array of intolerant, biased, maybe even radical attitudes that are sort of negative views of the US, of minorities, of India, but not necessarily overt sympathy for the Taliban. So let me make that clear here. The Pew Global Attitudes poll from the spring of 2014, this is even before the December 2014 attack in Peshawar that killed about 150 schoolchildren and teachers. Even before that, only 8% of respondents in Pakistan in the spring of 2014 reported having favorable views of the Taliban. Only 12% reported having favorable views of Al-Qaeda. So there's not necessarily expressions of overt sympathy for the Taliban. That's not what I'm sort of trying to look at here. The problem is sort of a confused narrative about terrorist groups. So from that same Pew 2014 survey, when asked to choose, 51% of respondents said that India posed the greatest threat to the country. Relative to 25% of respondents who said that the Taliban posed the greatest threat to the country and 2% who named Al-Qaeda. So reflecting a national narrative that still places India as a greater threat than the Taliban. So these are the attitudes I'm trying to understand. Why do they matter? Well, I argue that these create an enabling environment for militants. And in Pakistan, they're particularly problematic because they exist in conjunction with a great deal of violence, both terrorist violence and violence against minorities, attacks against minorities, as well as mob violence against minorities, such as when somebody is accused of blasphemy. All right, so the components of the study are that I took a qualitative approach to attitudes. So attitudes are treated as narratives and not as rankings on a favorability scale. What that enables me to do is to look at the links between attitudes and the education system vis-a-vis the media, state narratives, societal narratives, what students are studying in the home, and so on. So that enables me to trace out what's really causing narratives to be a certain way or the other. I engaged in fieldwork at the very source of the issue, if you will, in high schools, in Punjab, in Pakistan. And there were sort of three elements of this fieldwork. One was a textbook analysis. And these are some of the textbooks I studied. And then I sat in classes, in particular Pakistan studies classes, and also engaged in very detailed student focus groups, as well as teacher interviews. And these student focus groups form the crux of the narratives that we're going to talk about. So Pakistan studies is a core class, a core subject that students have to take before their board examinations, which sort of determine where they're going to go in life. If they fail the board exam, they don't have a metric degree. This is the secondary school board exam in Pakistan. So it's a very important sort of point at students' lives. And then I'm looking at the government curriculum as it's taught in both public as well as private schools. So the important thing to note here is that I'm not looking at madrasas directly and not looking at elite private schools that follow the British board exams. So this is something both are something that I'm going to be looking at in current research that's sort of ongoing. So let's delve into what the curriculum is in Pakistan. So the curriculum in Pakistan has changed over the years. In its current form, by and large, it was introduced in the early 1980s. And this 1981 University Grants Commission directive to Pakistan Studies textbook authors makes sort of the aims of the curriculum pretty clear. So I'll read out here. To demonstrate the point of the Pakistan Studies textbooks, that is, is to demonstrate that the basis of Pakistan is not to be founded in racial, linguistic, or geographical factors, but rather in the shared experience of a common religion. To get students to know and appreciate the ideology of Pakistan and to popularize it with slogans. And then to guide students towards the ultimate goal of Pakistan, which is the creation of a completely Islamized state. So the textbooks, it's important to note, in the 50s and 60s did not look anything like the textbooks past the 80s. So a brief overview of the textbooks sort of on certain key points that are relevant to the narratives I'm going to be talking about. So first of all, the Pakistani identity is defined as equivalent to Islam. Pakistan's ideology, which is a very important concept in these textbooks that takes up much of the first couple of chapters, is equated entirely with Islam. And these textbooks begin to the exclusion of religious minorities. Jihad is mentioned. The pillars of Islam are mentioned in the first chapters. Now, these mentions have gone away since a recent curriculum reform to a great degree, but the narratives still remain the same. So we can talk about the curriculum reform later if we get some time. On India and Hindus, the books are pretty relentlessly one-sided and negative. So some of the words mentioned used sort of frequently are conspiracy, and these are from the latest textbooks. Conspiracy, cunning, hostile, destroy, biased, deprive, ruin, hatred. On the West and the United States, the United States is mentioned quite sparingly. But when it is mentioned, it is sort of conceived as having betrayed Pakistan at sort of key points in its history, especially the 1971 war. And the US and the West are considered to engage in conspiracies against Pakistan. So that's an important point to note. Terrorism is only mentioned twice in one textbook. That is the latest textbook in Punjab that was written in 2012. And it's a very sort of cursory mention. So what happens in the classroom? Well, in the classroom, these textbooks reign supreme. The students are literally memorizing them word by word, line by line, page by page, because that's what the exam rewards. I mean, that's the goal of the teachers, is for the students to do well in the exams, and that's the goal of the students. And so that is essentially what's happening in the classrooms. There's little to no questioning. And there's definitely not much outside information presented, no different points of view, no evaluation of the evidence presented. The textbooks are literally just taken as the word that needs to be memorized. All right, so now I'll sort of delve into some of the main narratives that come out on terrorism. And these are mainly from the focus groups. So the dominant narrative that emerges is that foreign influences are responsible for terrorism. And these are India, the US, and their agency. So the CIA and the Research and Analysis Wing in India are raw. And so there are two forms that this foreign influences argument takes. One is a conspiracy theory form that India, the US, their agencies are out to destroy Pakistan. And for that, they're either training, funding, arming, or providing terrorists. So that's sort of the conspiracy theory version. Underlying that is the idea that Muslims can't be responsible for killing other Muslims. The second is a more sort of nuanced argument, which is that terrorists are engaging in attacks in retaliation for the US war in Afghanistan or for drone strikes. All right, so the other three explanations, there were sort of three other narratives that also came out on terrorism. One is sort of the religious narrative that terrorists engage in attacks in order to implement an Islamic way of life in Pakistan. And then there's sort of the economic explanation that poverty and unemployment leads people to engage in terrorism. There's also a political explanation, which is that the government is responsible. Pakistan's own government is responsible. But there was not much elaboration of this explanation. So what's the bottom line? I'm not saying that the textbooks are leading to these narratives on terrorism. But the framework of blaming the US and India is consistent with textbook content. The religious motivation can also be reinforced with textbooks because the textbooks talk about Jihad being all right, something that is encouraged even in order to spread Islam. But the bottom line is that it's really a combination of societal narratives and the media, along with the propaganda of extremist or militant organizations that helps form views and may predict radical views. All right, on narratives on America, and then I'm going to go sort of relatively quickly here. The sort of the main view is that the US is seen as dominating Pakistan. This is unwelcome. And the US impinges on Pakistan sovereignty. There are sort of the views that follow through from this foreign influences argument, but positives and negatives were acknowledged in the relationship. And in the narratives that come out, history is invoked. So 1971, the 1971 war is invoked. And the US is considered as having betrayed Pakistan. So that kind of follows exactly from the way things are depicted in the textbooks. But recent events also take center stage. So the Osama bin Laden raid, the Raymond Davis incident, those are pretty important in how students sort of discuss the US. So the bottom line here is that while the textbooks outline a skeleton of perspectives, if you will, on the US, the media and societal narratives then flesh out that narrative. All right, in the interest of time, I'm going to skip minorities. We can talk about that later if we have some time. But on India, the students basically came out with two main narratives. That India was historically an enemy and that it's currently sponsoring terrorism in Pakistan. Historically, an enemy is exactly in parity with the textbooks. But the current sponsoring of terrorism in Pakistan, while that is sort of, again, the textbooks don't, the textbooks are sort of consistent with the blame India, a blame India narrative. The current sponsoring of terrorism in Pakistan, done by India, is something that the army, the state, talks about quite a bit. So in April, I was in Pakistan in April and through early May. And there were a lot of media reports, newspapers, TV, with the army sort of giving out statements that Raw, the Research and Analysis Wing in India, is consistently instigating terrorism in Pakistan. So certainly textbooks and schools play a role, but current views are really defined by media and the state. All right, so to sort of conclude, and then I'll give some recommendations that follow through from this. For many views, we do see a direct correspondence between what the textbook content is and what students say, which then appears to be sort of fleshed out or beefed up by society and by media. But why is Pakistan's current educational system, why is that so important? Because it doesn't equip students to counter the problematic and prevailing narratives that are propagated by the media, by society, by the state. In fact, it both creates and propagates narratives of its own. Students have no ability. They're not taught how to question these narratives. They're not taught how to evaluate evidence. And that, in my view, is key if one is to counter these narratives of the state and the media and indeed of militant groups. So in terms of recommendations, I argue that what Pakistan needs is a massive overhauling of the curriculum. The curriculum reform that took place from 2004 to 2006 largely failed. It made marginal changes, marginal improvements, but it did not change overall narratives. The goal, I argue, is to follow an international level curriculum that incorporates rigorous analysis, critical thinking, and aims to teach sort of tolerance, peace, and create global citizens. And so one, I argue that world history should be taught as a core subject. In sort of the discussion, I'm happy to talk about this. But I engaged in some focus groups with university students when I was in Pakistan this month. And these university students are studying history at their master's level. And they actually went through the same education system. And they said that they had exactly these views in grade 10, grade 11, and so on. But since they've come to university and since they've started taking world history and they've been engaging with teachers and professors who have a much more sort of holistic view of things, their views have changed sort of drastically. So that's sort of a hopeful and important point to note. I also say that official textbooks need to include a full view of history. Present both sides of the story. In India, the federal level textbooks actually present the views of partition both from the Pakistani perspective as well as the Indian perspective. And I'm going to talk in a minute about how I know that the state textbooks in India are pretty bad. But the federal level textbooks offer a nice example that one can perhaps follow. I say that the books need to reflect international scholarship. They can't be authored necessarily by foreign scholars because in Pakistan, that will never fly. These books have to be authored by Pakistani scholars but need to reflect international scholarship on these issues. The sort of second recommendation is that we need to sort of halt the flow of terrorist narratives that exist in mainstream media, in mosques, in madrasas. Because one, the students are not equipped to counter them at this point. And two, these narratives are very much out there in the mainstream in Pakistan. Now with the National Action Plan post-Peshawar, Pakistan has at least recognized that this is a problem and has argued that this indeed is a recommendation from that National Action Plan. But implementation of this still is not fully there. And finally, and this is the most important thing, and this is sort of the elephant in the room, the state narrative needs to be altered. So the state is the architect of the curriculum. As you could see from the University Grants Commission directive, the state is exactly why this curriculum exists. The state considers it in its interest to propagate conspiracy theories. The state considers it in its interest to define itself in opposition to India. But the key is for the state to realize that this narrative is not getting it anywhere. And we can talk more about how likely or not likely that is. So the final note here is that I know that textbooks have problems everywhere. So the curriculum, in most places, is biased because it tries to promote a sense of nationalism. And so there are biases in India and Bangladesh and so on. And in Pakistan, I'm certainly not arguing that the curriculum is responsible for creating terrorists. But Pakistan is a place which has seen a great amount of violence. And I argue that the curriculum is one place where we can sort of stop narratives that lead to such violence or that have allowed violence to exist and perhaps even to thrive. OK, so I'll end there. Thank you. Thanks. Thanks a lot, Madhya. Why don't we go to you, Dr. Fox? Thank you. And it's a wonderful opportunity to be able to address some comments, particularly through the lens of teacher education, to be part of some of the solution finding for this area of the world. And I believe that Dr. Afzal's research and our conversation today are also going to expose some of the complexity of the issues and the challenges that are faced. And I think voices and work together, both from the inside and the outside, are going to be part of the solution finding that we have. Using your wonderful research on the textbooks and on the materials, the curriculum available, I'm going to talk a little bit further. And not only will I share a little bit of a comparative perspective through an international lens, but I think it's very interesting to look at what is happening in Pakistan and think about it in terms of the current needs of the country, but also how we can bring this conversation forward to find some solution making pathways. Curriculum design and reform take a tremendous amount of time. And you don't know what happens to them until they're already done. And then we're years down the road. And so this is where I think it's important to look at possibilities for things to be done simultaneously with the curriculum reform. I couldn't agree more that curriculum reform needs to happen. And this is true in many, many countries where literacy is an enormous challenge, particularly for areas in extreme poverty. So I know Michael's going to talk about the educational landscape, so I'm going to give that off to you in just a few minutes. But I want to just bring out what I know about the extreme differences in and around the country, urban challenges, rural challenges, challenges of students living in different economic situations, students who have had effective teachers and students who have not had the advantage of effective teachers. What is happening in the schools, how the administration leads those schools, that part of the educational landscape only opens the door to some of the discussions that need to be had. So I just want to turn this to some other important variables. And I'm going to use the term multi-pronged actions because I think that whenever we have problem solving that needs to happen, when we look at it from both through multiple lenses and looking at multiple variables, we also need to attack it, if you will, in lots of different ways. So as educational researchers, we need to band together. So folks working in policy, folks working in governmental issues, folks like myself who are working in teacher education and educational research, how are we going across these different areas, these different disciplines, to pool our research findings together. When we do qualitative research such as this one, it's so important because you really get below the surface, but we don't generalize. And so by having multiple types of qualitative research that we're able to contribute to the forum for discussion, that is going to inform some of the deeper issues that exist in different contexts across the country. So how do you think we might be able to incorporate some of this systematic research across the country at different levels, at many different levels? And I think that's going to be one of the areas that we need to look at. I'm going to talk about what we're doing in teacher education and give you some examples from some projects that I've had in other countries as well as in Pakistan. And we've been looking at the effects and the importance of teacher education along the continuum of an educator's life. So what we do as educators is hugely important in the classrooms, how we do it, how we look at the impact of our work on the students in our classrooms. That starts as we work to prepare teachers. And I'm going to use the term teacher education because in so many countries of the world, there's a term teacher training. And I want to get away from that term because training gives off the idea that I'm telling someone exactly what they have to do and how they have to do it and when they have to do it. When we work as teacher educators, we equip teachers, pre-service, in-service, early career experienced with multiple strategies, ideas, approaches, research, knowledge in order to be able to effect change in our classrooms. So teacher education includes concepts of developmental phases and stages that students go through in their lifetime. Teacher education includes content-specific as well as discipline-specific knowledge. I have a couple of slides on that in a second. So these four areas of looking at teacher education in the pre-service, which I mean those students who are preparing to enter the classroom, ongoing professional development that's robust, that meets the needs of the teachers in their contexts, that understands and honors what they know and can do, but helps them move forward to new steps. Hugely important in Pakistan, in the US now, everywhere in the world, is teacher's knowledge of culture, the development of intercultural competence, and teacher's knowledge of the role that first and second language, mother tongue, plays in students' ability to understand, engage in, and be successfully being successful as students. So these areas are going to be ones that I'm going to be looking at. So I believe that there are some real changes called for in teacher education. And I just mentioned my dislike, I suppose I should say, of the term teacher training. Teacher education needs to be put in place for teachers working with students from the very early ages all the way up through the more advanced levels. So we also need to establish a culture, if you will, of career-long professional learning. And funding and the means to do that need to be provided. So I think you're hearing some governmental connections. They are coming into what I'm saying. So from teacher preparation through induction, which means that those first couple of years, through early career, which we define as maybe, say, the first five years, we want to retain those teachers in the classroom. We also want to provide professional learning and mentoring knowledge for experienced teachers. When you think about the fact that we have teachers who have been dedicated to their career for many, many years, but perhaps went through their teacher education or their teacher training programs many, many years ago, the landscape has changed. Teachers' knowledge needs to also be commensurate with that landscape change. When we work with pre-service teachers, when we look at both content knowledge, because that is hugely important, that teachers know the subjects they teach and how to teach those subjects to students. So content knowledge, discipline-specific knowledge, but that's not enough. They also need to have pedagogical content knowledge. That means how do you turn a classroom into a classroom where students are the inquirers? How do you turn a classroom into interactive learning, where students are engaged in creating their own questions? So they read what might need to be read, but then they flip that around and they come up with questions that are meaningful to them because in learning we know that when we are the most engaged ourselves, that's when the most learning occurs. And I can't tell you how many classrooms I've been in where students do nothing but sit very properly and repeat exactly what is said to them. That's not questioning. That's opening your head and hoping you will be able to remember what was just said to you. That's not wrestling with physics problems or concepts. That's not taking what's in a textbook and trying to imagine how does this apply to me? How might I want or need to use this in my own life? What is the applicability for what I might be able to do? So those are very important pieces. Formative and summative assessment processes. So I know that a lot of the rote learning is assumed to provide good grades on final exams. However, we also know that that's not really learning deep, deep learning. So we want to promote critical thinking skills and develop those skills from an early age onward in a developmentally appropriate ways. Understanding and helping teachers become researchers in their own right, in their own classrooms. We need the voices from those individual classrooms in the form of research. So not my opinion, but the data in my classroom say this. This is what my students have done and how do I get them to do even more? So that's hugely important. And in pre-service teacher education, we also want our students to know languages, know culture, and develop our own intercultural competence. The same thing is paralleled for our experienced teachers. But we don't start from helping them first understand what it is to be a teacher. We need to take them from where they are and from where their experiences are. And we want to hear what their questions are that are rising from their own classrooms. Why is this not working, but this one is? What might I do differently? So develop an increasing understanding of how critical reflection can also not only inform what they're doing with their students, but inform the types of professional development that they want to identify themselves for their own professional learning. And again, that term engagement is huge because we know from educational psychology that if we are going to be engaged, we are going to be the most avid learners. So around the world, the entire world landscape is changing. In schools in the DC area, just in Fairfax County alone, we have 130 languages spoken in the schools, and that's a minimum by the way. We, in Fairfax, our colleagues have what we call intake exams in 130 languages. In one of the middle schools, where I spend a fair amount of time, there are 72 languages spoken, and a middle school is grades seven and eight in this particular school. So knowledge that teachers continue to gain about the role that language and culture play in the educational process for the students in our classrooms. This is also hugely important in Pakistan. We have multiple languages that are spoken in Pakistan, developing intercultural literacy. I'm aware that with provincial decision making that has recently taken place in Pakistan, that this is about the challenge, but I think it can be a real plus as well. I think by looking regionally, we can look at the role that Mother Tongue plays. We can look critically and knowledgeably about models of language and second language acquisition and see how that plays in the schools that are in that particular region. A point I was just talking about with my colleagues before was teachers also need to be comfortable and fluent in the language in which they are teaching. So if you're going to promote discussion in your classroom, you are also going to need to be able to be fluent to be able to navigate that language structure. So compared to other countries similar to Pakistan, large classrooms in developing areas of Far East Russia where I've most recently spent time and in China as well, classrooms of 50 and 60 students. This is a governmental or provincial decision. It's most important to lower those classroom sizes to create some greater opportunities for interactivity. The areas of the world where students are living in poverty, we need to look at across countries how poverty is being addressed. Where languages and cultures converge, what is happening across countries? And I will tell you that the teacher education needs and the work that we've done with teachers in critical reflective capacity in teacher research is really making a difference in their schools. We've also been working in higher education because when you're working in teacher education, those who are on the faculty working with preparing teachers also need to be addressing updates and changes and be attuned to the times for change. So in working with teams, we two summers ago started a project with National University of Science and Technology in Islamabad and teachers of engineering, professors of engineering came and spent four weeks with us and we worked both in content specific areas and in educational approaches for looking at backward design, looking at interactive learning, look at authentic assessment and using those for means of testing. I have a grant proposal out with the University of Management and Technology, I'm waiting to hear if that gets funded, but what we've learned is faculty are also looking to affect changes. So many of the colleges and universities have increased their faculty enormously in the last eight to 10 years. The services that are provided to faculty also need to provide that professional development. So we need longitudinal data, we do need textbook update, that does take time, but funding should extend I think for projects beyond that two year normal level. It takes about two years to get in and begin to do something. In order to be able to measure impact, we need at least three years if not four to five to really look at what's going on, to get changes in motion, to look at the results of those changes and to loop back and inform some additional steps. University faculty need to be included in these initiatives for reform. School administrators also need to be brought into the loop of this. Informed decision making in the schools, teachers being part of the decision making process, a new role for teacher leadership, that's also a movement in the US. This is going to have impact on our K-12, our pre-K through 12 students, and they must also, our impact on their learning needs to be part of the research endeavor that we have. Thanks. Thank you, thanks a lot. Dr. Fox, let me turn it over to Michael, and then we'll open it up. Well, thank you very much. It's an honor to be here on this panel with you, Moid, and Rebecca, and Mediha. And congratulations, Mediha, for the report. I'm struck by how the narratives that you heard from students and teachers, how it's also familiar, and as you suggested yourself, we hear this all the time in Pakistan on TV news shows, we hear it from religious leaders in social media. It's the talking points of a number of political parties, including the current one in recent weeks in particular. So I'd argue that these narratives are not anomalous, if that's the way to pronounce that word. They're nearly, they're closer to ubiquitous. So I think that this raises a question for discussion perhaps later. Since a number, since so many Pakistanis subscribe to these views, what accounts for those that do not? Because there are a fair number of those that are not educated in the types of schools that you profile that do not necessarily share these views, even if they learn these things in school. So anyway, my task, though, is to step back and provide some broader context for Pakistan's education crisis. And I'll do so briefly in three ways. I will speak about Pakistan's youth demographics. I will highlight several challenges faced by Pakistani youth and how these impact their access to education. And finally, I'll say just a few brief words about youth radicalization prospects. First, on the issue of youth radicalization, pardon me, youth demographics, I'll start with a brief caveat. As many of you know, Pakistan has not held a population census since 1998. It is very much overdue. And for this reason, projecting population figures is a very perilous task. The most updated and credible population figures come not from the Pakistani government, but rather, at least in my view, from the UN. And so the estimates that I'll provide here are based on UN figures, unless otherwise stated. So there are essentially two basic conclusions to make about Pakistan's youth demographics. One is that Pakistan is a very young country indeed. As you all know, Pakistan has about, give or take, 190 million people overall, and 60% of them are 24 years old or younger. As a percentage of the total population, only Yemen has more people under 24. Additionally, more than a third of Pakistanese people are under the age of 15, and the median age in Pakistan is 22. The second basic conclusion about youth demographics in Pakistan is that Pakistan will be a very young country for a very long time. The 15 to 24 year old bracket is expected to increase significantly in the 2020s. The under 24 population will still be in the majority by 2030. The median age is expected to be just 34, as late as 2050, and only 43 by 2100. And this will all happen against the backdrop of a rising overall population. Pakistan's annual population growth rate, which is currently 1.8%, give or take, is projected to remain over 1% until at least the year 2030. Population density will rise from about 218 people per square kilometer in 2010 to about 341 people per square km in 2050. Now, I'll bring in some global context, some global perspective here. Pakistan is certainly one of the world's youngest countries, but Niger has the world's youngest median age at 15 years, nine other countries, one of which is Afghanistan, have median ages of 17 or younger. 10 African countries are expected to have a median age of 22 or less by 2050 when Pakistan's is expected to be 34. Now, a major implication of such a young and large and rising population is the great strain on natural resources and basic services. For so many young people in the country, meeting basic needs is an immediate and immense challenge, and a lack of access to basic services can compromise young people's access to education. For example, up to a third of Pakistanis lack access to safe water, and many end up consuming unsafe water. The result is a very large epidemic of waterborne disease that sickens untold numbers of children in Pakistan and kills 1.2 million of them per year, and according to some estimates, 630 of them per day. So, so many kids getting sick, so many kids dying from bad water is a tremendous tragedy. Among other things, it makes it very difficult for them to go to school. What doesn't help is that the public health system in Pakistan is really a mess, it's in a shambles with only about one doctor for every 18,000 people. There's also a malnutrition epidemic in the country. UNICEF has said that it could kill an entire generation. So when kids are malnourished, those fortunate to make it to school will have a lot of trouble, will have trouble concentrating, will have trouble learning, will have trouble focusing and studying. And I think that the fact that so many Pakistanis are poor makes this all even worse. So in effect, when you're in no position to attend school or to focus or concentrate, then I think that school textbooks and curriculums, regardless of their content, it really amounts to luxuries. So, what implications might this have for the notion of radicalization? On the one hand, plenty of impoverished young people in Pakistan become radicalized. Plenty of them go on to commit violent acts, not to state the obvious, Pakistan is home to many young militants. And I believe Moid actually, in an article a few years ago, had observed that just about every terrorist attack committed in Pakistan since 9-11 was staged by someone under the age of 30, if I have that right. The latest British Council survey on Pakistani youth attitudes finds that escaping from poverty is the most common reason why young people in the country commit violent acts. Now on the other hand, of course, there are plenty of impoverished young people in the country that do not become radicalized or become militants. And I think we could all be assured that there are plenty of young people in Pakistan with all the food, water, electricity that they need who become radicalized. I think that, well, essentially many succumb to the blandishments of extremist ideologies, regardless of their socioeconomic level or of their education level, for that matter. But as setting aside this issue of radicalization, the youth cohort in Pakistan faces great hardship and there really is great reason to be concerned, setting aside the issue of radicalization concerns. I'll just share very briefly a story, a very sad story of a young Pakistani who I think really embodies the challenges of youth in the country and the tragic consequences that can ensue. His name is Rajah Khan. I'm sure many of you will remember this gentleman. This is a tale, this is not a tale of a teenage suicide bomber. It is a tale of a very simple, impoverished, unemployed, and likely uneducated young father. One day in October 2011, when Khan was 23, he left a note saying that he could no longer bear to live in poverty. He then walked in front of the parliament building in Islamabad and he set himself on fire and he died a few hours later of his burns. Many in Pakistan would later draw parallels between what Khan did and the young Tunisian food seller who set himself on fire in front of a government building in Tunisia, triggering the Arab Spring Movement. Now to get a different type of sense of how difficult it can be to be a young person in Pakistan, consider the prize-winning essay from a recent contest which was sponsored by a youth organization in Pakistan. The contest asks participants to write an essay that proposes the ideal youth policy. The winner was a teenage girl from Lahore. She advocated that 100,000 Pakistani youth be quote, exported each year to aging Western countries in need of young labor. So in essence, the winning entry proposed a youth policy that essentially gets young people to leave Pakistan. And polls have found that some polls have found that three quarters of Pakistani youth would welcome the opportunity to move abroad. One always needs to look at polls with some skepticism but still it's worth singling out. Certainly the youth bulge in Pakistan is not all doom and gloom. It's a coin and academic term though I'm not an academic. Youth do exercise agency in Pakistan. What I mean by that is that the country does enjoy a rich legacy of youth civic engagement. There's a deep activist streak that runs through the youth cohort in the country. Young people played a big role in the lawyers movement back in 2007, 2008, a pro-democracy movement against President Musharraf. Some Pakistanis have said that this movement is akin to their version of an Arab Spring. There's often, also there's often talk, getting back to the demographic issue. There's talk of how Pakistan can reap a dividend, a demographic dividend. If the young masses in the country can be successfully educated, if they can be trained and incorporated into the job market, then they have the potential to revitalize the country's economy. I fear though that this may be asking too much. Successfully educating the young masses anytime soon, I think it would be a truly herculean task. Why? Because 25 million Pakistani kids between the ages of six, pardon me, five and 16, which is nearly 50% of all children in that age group are not in school at all. In Baluchistan, this is where the statistics really get scary. In Baluchistan, 66% of kids between five and six are not in school. The figure is 47% in Punjab, the most prosperous and populous province in Pakistan. Overall, 85% of Pakistanis ages five to 16 are not in school. And these figures come from the Alif Ilhan organization. In recent years, economists have estimated Pakistan will require about 9% GDP growth to successfully employ the country's under 20 population. And yet growth today, of course, is not 9%. It's somewhere around 3%, 4%. And according to official government figures in Pakistan, only about 15% of 15 to 29 year old Pakistanis have completed secondary school and less than 6% have received technical and vocational education and training. So to conclude, with all this in mind, I'd invite you to bring your attention back to the young man Rajakan, the one who set fire to himself a few years back because he couldn't bear to live in poverty. Right after he was buried, I think it was the day he was buried, his wife gave birth to their third son. And so today, assuming all as well, this boy would be almost four years old. So he's rapidly approaching a school age. I think it's worth wondering what his prospects are for getting an education and for having a good life overall, given the challenges that he and so many other young Pakistanis face. I think we could only hope that his prospects will be better than his father's. Thank you. Thanks, Michael, and thanks to all the panelists. We will open it up. We have still 12, so about half an hour. Let me abuse my privilege of sitting here to just say a few things, a couple of things, maybe not elicit a response unless somebody wants to, and then we'll quickly go to the people who want to ask questions. But just to play devil's advocate, because all of you seem to be on the same page. So let me be the bad guy here. I think there's no question that textbooks are bad. There's also no questions that textbooks should be changed. I think I'm at least sold to them. Fine. And that's been the case for a number of years. So what? The so what question, right? I noted you mentioned the word correspondence when you talked about education. What is that? Is that a link? Is that a correlation? Is that causality? Is that something we don't know yet? Because I think a lot has been said in your report is actually a great value added to literature and the conversation we've had here. But the bottom line to me, at least, is all of you are saying things are bad. Now, how do we build on this to find out what exactly adds up with textbooks to make things go wrong? And just want to throw out a few data points. One, Michael's figures, not your figures, but the figures you quoted about out-of-school children. So clearly, with 25 million or however many out-of-school children, actually, it may be more, they are not being influenced by the textbooks. So I think there's a very good control treatment kind of group here if somebody wants to go in and look at how they are responding to their environment and where they're getting things from. You mentioned India. But if you break down the polls and look at youth-specific polls, youth are much more liberal on India than the elder generation. The elder generation supposedly studied textbooks that were before the 1980s. There's, again, a question there. Pakistan had, Ahmadiyya writes, throughout its history, pre-1980 declared the sect anti or non-Muslim in the 70s, the Bengal problem, et cetera, et cetera. So I guess the point is, we've got to a point where you've very clearly, all of you have articulated that there's a serious problem in education. What else is adding up to this to make things go the way they're going, I think, is an important question. The final thing I'll say is, is there a problem of self-selection in the way we deal with this issue? That's another question that comes to mind as I have studied this field. So we talk about terrorism on the media, or terrorist narratives on the media. You've sort of mentioned everybody thinks of that, conspiracy theories, et cetera. But there are other views as well. Pakistan's most popular TV show till last year when Geo, the big news channel, got into a crisis was Najam Sethi's show, who's a very famous journalist, very much on the left when it comes to his views. Why are people listening to him if they're so prone to these conspiracies? Anyways, I'm not looking for answers. We're just saying that I think we've got to a point where the conversation can really go forward now. And your next report should answer some of these questions. So let me open it up, starting with you, sir. And then I'll go around. Yes, so Mike, welcome to you. Good morning. My name is Arnold Zeitlin, and I've been involved in Pakistani affairs since I opened up the first Associated Press Bureau there in 1969. Two things. One, what is the source of the idea that the creation, that the goal of Pakistan was a completely Islamist state, as opposed to being a safe haven for Muslims? And two, what is the impact of corruption on education? I mean, we've just seen the breakup of a huge diploma mill, and there's widespread cheating, buying and selling of posts, buying and selling of grades, et cetera, et cetera. This must have a tremendous impact. So if I understand your first question correctly, it is, why was the, you know? Well, this has been sort of, is Pakistan a country for Muslims, a Muslim majority state, or an Islamic country? This has been a question that Pakistan, in some sense, hasn't wrestled with that much, because very quickly in its history, it went to the side of being an Islamic state. Even though Pakistan's founder, many, many argue, intended it to be a Muslim majority state. In 1981, the textbooks were changed under the direction of the ultra-Orthodox Ziaul Haq, who was a military dictator, and who certainly espoused the Islamic state kind of interpretation. Interestingly, and this, I think Pakistan needs to have this conversation. It's very, very difficult, Muslim majority versus Islamic state. And I think this sort of goes back to a question we've also raised, which is sort of the things are bad. Where do we go from here? One of the really great things, as I said, in my current research, I've seen in focus groups and universities, although anybody who reaches the university level is, by definition, a select group of students, they're having exactly these discussions. With me, they had this discussion about whether Pakistan should be, in fact, a secular or an Islamic state. So there's hope yet, in my view, just to bring that back. I think the second question of corruption in education. So I think Michael brought up these great points about access to education. Even where schools exist, we have a lot of infrastructure problems. We don't have drinking water in schools. We don't have the school budget is not used appropriately. It's appropriated by teachers, administrators. So there are ghost schools where teachers don't show up. Schools are missing walls, missing toilets. And at the macro level, and this is less a problem of corruption, but perhaps more a problem of implementation, Pakistan has a very meager budget that goes to education, less than 3% of GDP. In its national education policy of 2009, Pakistan argued that 7% should go to GDP. We're nowhere close to that. But even of that, less than 3%, not all of it is being spent. A big chunk of it goes unspent. So I think there's room for better implementation to increase access, even with the meager budget available. Corruption is certainly a problem. I think it exists in many parts of the world, but certainly it's being skimmed. Money is being skimmed. I think one interesting thing that's happened, especially in Punjab, is there's a program monitoring and implementation unit that actually goes to schools. Does these random spot checks and makes sure that the schools are running as they're supposed to, that there's a wall, that there is drinking water, toilets, and so on, that things are happening as they should. And that has actually apparently increased access, or that has correlated with increased access. So I think corruption is the problem, but perhaps more so the budget that is allocated to education needs to be spent, and a greater amount of the budget needs to be allocated. That's sort of the greater problem. OK. Thanks. So I'm here. I'll come around. Yeah, hi. I'm Mr. Tahmad. Hi, Madhya. I now work for IFPRI as a senior research fellow, but I've lived and worked in Pakistan all my life. I think that I need to throw some challenges at you, Madhya. The first is that any qualitative study in Pakistan, given its circumstances right now, especially relating to terrorism and India, United States, you have to be careful about your results. Because if you go to Pakistan as you have been recently, most of the people are severely affected by these terrorists. You see children, there is a bomb blast. You see children 10, 12, 8 years. They are the greatest spectators on that. So when you talk to people who have gone through and you throw some statistics, I think you need to be careful. The second point is that if you went to three different sets of schools, say in Karachi to the really posh private schools and you went to the madrasas and you compare your results with the results that you have, you're going to get extremely different, entirely different results. So I know you have qualified that in your paper. I was reading it. But you still need to be in a forum like this. We need to actually, like Michael did, focus on some of the other aspects as well. Curriculums, I'm glad that you brought that out because we need very serious reforms. And if that is taken up, it will be a very good thing. One other question, Al-Qaeda, Taliban, you know those terms are very difficult to understand. There is not written on them. Who are the Taliban's who are the Al-Qaeda? I don't understand any of them. So you have to be careful about when you ask people what the Taliban is and what there's some not some clarity in their minds is who they are addressing, who they're talking about. On the education, I think one of the things that we forget in terms of Pakistan is that the teachers are very low paid in Pakistan. So whatever you're suggesting is like a burden on those people because they really don't have the resources and they don't have the interest because they are so low paid. I think what we need to go and understand is that youth bulge, you talked about youth radicalization, I think we need governance reforms seriously. When the government fails to protect its youth, fails to provide them education, they will turn to groups which do provide some sense of belonging, as it's happening all over the world, if you see. The world is changing. It is becoming very violent. What is happening in Syria or what is happening elsewhere? So you need to understand the people context on these things. Okay, thanks. Let me collect a few, we'll come back because the time will go there and we'll come back. And if you could just keep your comments short and preferably ask a question. Hi, my name is Zainab. My question is from Adiha. Would you get a chance to also look at Islamic Studies curriculum? Because when I did my metric, the views on terrorism and at Jihad and minority rights that pretty much complimented what we were being taught in past studies. Also, I'll just quickly respond to the gentleman here. In 1949, Objective Solution was passed in Pakistan that pretty much set the stage for Pakistan being an Islamic State and not Muslim Majority State. Thanks. Let me get the gentleman here. Thank you. My name is Gopal Ratnam, I'm a journalist. One question for you. You mentioned in your report as well as in your comments about how the curriculum, the state is in fact the architect of the curriculum. I think towards the end of your remarks, you mentioned how, and so there's now post-Peshawar. There is a recognition that it's not working. I just wanna see if there's any evidence in fact that the state as a whole is now thinking or maybe looking at a curriculum reform one more time. And I just wanna clarify with something Michael said. I think he said 85% of kids five to 16 are not in school. I just wanted to, is that the right number? I just thought I heard. Yeah, it is. I'm sorry about that. Okay, great. But that's the only question. Do you wanna take these? Sure. No, I'll encourage Rebecca and Michael if you wanna chime in, please do. All right, so thanks for the questions and comments. So I'll try to address as many as I can. The state, so one of the things I mentioned in my report is that now curriculum formation responsibilities have been decentralized to the provinces. So the state, so there's no ministry of education actually in Pakistan anymore, which presents a challenge to a federal level curriculum reform. But there are, the state, sorry, the provinces in fact separately are some of them looking at curriculum reform, not always in the ways that we would want to. So in the KPK, the curriculum reform is sort of being rolled back to, for example, include mentions of jihad again. However, in Sindh, things are looking better. So Sindh, the Sindh Assembly, I think, has been trying to include Jinnah's August 11th speech to the Constituent Assembly in textbooks, which really sort of argues that Pakistan should be a Muslim majority state. So hope and not so much, both there. In terms of Islamic studies, I did look at Islamic studies in sort of the pilot, but in the interest of keeping things focused, I chose to focus on Pakistan studies, a lot of the Islamic studies teachers, in fact, are imams at mosques, et cetera. I think the reason I focused on Pakistan studies is because I wanted to get a worldview rather than just sort of the interpretation of Islam. But that's sort of that. I think responding to Nizith, one of the things I really wanted to sort of clarify here at the very beginning, so I'm glad you sort of asked this, is that in no way am I trying to sort of present students in high schools as the problem here. So they are not villains in any way. In fact, I had awesome conversations with them as we were coming out with this. These are the narratives that came out, so I'm sort of presenting them as accurately as I can. When I looked, so I looked at the official curriculum, but even in elite schools, these are the narratives that came out. The students were talking in English, were very articulate, but expressed some of the same narratives. Now, with the all levels curriculum, I certainly think that things are different, both with the curriculum as well as with attitudes. And I think Michael, one of the things that you asked is what accounts for differences. So some of the very vocal people we see in Pakistan who are sort of liberal, et cetera, have influences that lie beyond the official curriculum, whether it is at the university level, whether it is having gone through sort of this British education system, whether it is having gone through the Pakistani education system, but having studied abroad, and other sort of influences. And I think just to sort of clarify the point on the Taliban and Al-Qaeda, I was sort of very clear that I did not mention the Taliban or Al-Qaeda by name, because this is sort of one of the main criticisms of public opinion polls, is that people don't, people will not respond to you if you sort of start talking about the Taliban and Al-Qaeda, or they may not know what this necessarily means. And so I talked about terrorism in general and violence in general, and then these are the things that sort of came out. I'll just jump in briefly. Clarifying your question, if I misstated this stat, I apologize, what I should have said if I didn't, was that 85% of Pakistanis, overall ages 15 and 16, are not in school. Or not in school, right? And just to get back to what was said over here, it's very complicated to say which types of schools are more responsible for these curriculums than others. Just in the sense that recent news, this gentleman that was arrested for allegedly being involved in the attack on Sabin Mahmoud, he went to IBA, which is one of the top of the line universities in the country. So it's a complicated story. Gentlemen in the back, then we'll go here. Yeah, I have a rather simplistic question, but I haven't heard any mention of it. You're introducing yourself? My name is Don Kirk. I'm a journalist, a reason I was in Pakistan actually. I haven't heard any mention, maybe I missed it, of the influence of madrasas on the educational system and the role that they might play, aside from spreading a certain ideology and religious belief and fervor, the role that they might play in educating Pakistan youth that maybe I missed it since I came in late, but it seems to me that, you know, you can't really just, I'm sort of wondering how can you discuss education in Pakistan without mentioning at all the influence and the role of the madrasas. Thank you. Hi, my name is Sana, I'm a recent master's grad, so I don't know how to introduce myself anymore. My question is actually for Dr. Fox. I really enjoyed your looking at others, countries where there are similar challenges that Pakistan also faces, and as a Pakistani, I'm curious about what you think the role of, we looked at bottom up, we looked at something very micro, such as textbooks. What about the issues coming from the top? Last summer, when the Pakistani military began the operations in the north against the TTP, there was a very confused narrative in the public about why we were there, who the enemy was, what the role of people would be in that conversation. So if you're very strong institutions do not corral that support against that narrative, how can we then expect smaller things to trickle and reference in the 80s, the textbooks that existed because of Zia's ideology existed because Zia pushed them from the top. So what are really the roles the institutions need to be doing in order to counter these narratives that I think everyone is very much interested in revising? Thank you. Okay, let me quickly respond to your question before I go to the panelists because I wanna bail Madhi out. I was being a bit facist when I raised the questions I did with her. This report we specifically asked to be on the public education schooling system. And the idea behind that simply was that there's a lot that's being written on Madrasas already. But we forget that two thirds of Pakistani students or children who are in school don't go to either Madrasas or the private schools. And so the whole idea of this report we actually boxed in Madhi are two looking at this. And this of course the report is not self-containing. I mean it complements a lot of the other material that is out there. And Madrasas I think take a disproportionate sort of space when it comes to education in Pakistan but I'll leave it at that. Do you want to go ahead? Okay, I'll start in and then hopefully you will feel free to add to... I think your question also helps to expose some of the complexity of what we're talking about. The hierarchical structure of the country, the traditional hierarchy. How people do or don't feel able to express personal opinions. How they are taught from a young age or not to be able to engage in respectful debate. How, not so much from an American perspective of the word tolerance but from the European and the French to l'érance that really includes respect and regard, deep regard for others. How that is fostered from an early age and what the motivation and the engagement of the faculty at a school have with regard to their students. All of those are pieces of this puzzle. The fact that faculty in schools, in government schools are so poorly paid, the absentee rate is astounding. How faculty are teaching with textbooks. I mean, the issues at hand are pretty incredible. When you had mentioned about this idea of correspondence and causality and correlation, we can look at correlations in our quantitative research but when we look at correspondences in our qualitative research, the idea that we can look in different contexts and expose the deep, deep things that are going on those deep aspects. So I think all of that is in part an answer to your question about why many issues are not being addressed. Both the teachers and the students don't at this point, for the most part, have that ability to know how to approach this type, this level of discussion so that things like what we're doing today that are based in research or that are based in what students are learning or not what students are hearing and how they respond to the media, how that can be turned into an open discussion, that's something that's hugely important and I'm glad that you brought that up. On the issue of madrasas, I've never done a formal research study on them so I'm not qualified to give a final word but I'll just say that there is a lot of controversy in terms of the research that has been done on them on several levels. One in terms of enrollment figures, how many people actually are enrolled? There's some, the World Bank came out a few years ago saying it was a relatively low number than others said, no, that's not true, they're higher. And also in terms of how serious a threat these institutions really pose in terms of radicalization, my sense has always been that these are a small part of a broader problem. Certainly some kids have been radicalized in madrasas but more kids I think are radicalized elsewhere and not always in schools so I'll leave it with that. Sure. So just to follow up on the point about madrasas, the one thing that I did see is that this one student who had the most radical views and stood out from the others did actually attend a madrasa in addition to the school, in addition to the government school. So that's an important point to note about madrasas and there are other studies that have been done in madrasas that show attitudes being quite problematic that come out from there. So certainly that's the case. I think in terms of years of education, this is something that's being brought out quite a bit. So I wanted to sort of talk about the evidence out there. There's no monotonic relationship between years of education and attitudes in Pakistan when looked at quantitatively across the whole country. In fact, one of the reasons that I approached Mui to do this study was because I had done a quantitative paper that looked at education in Pakistan, years of education in Pakistan, and found that while there was no monotonic relationship between years of education and opinions looking at, you know, Pew Global Attitude polls data, PIPA data and so on, I did see the differences by gender. So boys, in fact, or men, as they got more educated, had worse views, which may perhaps explain partly what we saw with Saad Aziz, the IBA grad, but that's not to say that more educated men are more likely to just become terrorists, but they had worse views in terms of looking at outcomes. I think the one thing that I will say about teachers is that it is definitely an uphill battle, as people have pointed out. Not only are they underpaid, not very motivated, but thinking about what they need to do is sort of a two-step process. One, they need to be reeducated in terms of sort of content, and two, reeducated in terms of how to teach, but some of the easy things that we can do here to start off might be to sort of deemphasize the matriculation examination altogether and have teacher-student interactions in classrooms being the way that students are evaluated. Two, we could introduce a different subject, like world history, and get new teachers to teach it again, no easy task, but rather than overhaul the entire system, some tweaks might be easier to start off with. All right, we're at 12 o'clock with your indulgence. I'll ask for five more minutes because we started late, I saw two hands, one in the corner there and one back here, and then I want to give one minute to somebody who's in the audience, Pakistan's former minister of planning, who, while he was in office, started or coined a growth strategy for Pakistan, which essentially, the premise, if I understand it correctly, was youth employment. And what I wanted to ask you is, you talk about youth employment, but with all this going on, where are you gonna get the youth who are going to be employed? Thank you so much. Thank you very much. My name is Anand Patwarthan from the University of Maryland, so very happy to see you, Malia, again, and thanks to the panel. My question was really about your concluding point, which was about the elephant in the room. And we have spent a lot of time talking about education curriculum reform, but if I understood correctly, one of your points was really about the state. And I wonder how far one could go with that and what one does for that last aspect. Hello, my name is Shahan, I'm from Pakistan, I'm here for one week. Actually, I belong to the Kigil-Baltistan on the north side of Pakistan, which we observed last five years, 10 years. When I was in school, we were used to go to community schools, but there was no sectarian issue in those days. I have studied with Sunni, Shia, and Ismari, friends. Now what's happening in the last three years is in Kigil-Baltistan, like apart from madrasas and private schools, there are now schools are building by different NGOs and different sectarian groups. They are like focusing on this. They are very good in private school, like doing private education. Their curriculum is like private, they have their own curriculum, which are very good. Some are teaching like Iran, Iran history of Iran, some are teaching like history of Saudi Arabia. And they are also good at teaching the science to modern technologies. And this is the concern like for last five years, this is happening in Kigil-Baltistan. We are losing the diversity in schools. So only the students are going to Sunni community schools and they are going to Shia community schools. So this is like, just it's not a question, just I'm just sharing this, what we are observing over there. That's great actually, that's very, very good to know. Why don't we give it to Mr. Nadeem-ul-Haq here and then we'll come back to the panel for a minute each. Thank you, that would be great. Microphone. Let me just congratulate Madhya. I think it's a very nice paper, very interesting paper. It builds on a long line of research that's being placed in Pakistan. People in mind that I have this, for example, Parvez-ul-Balt and KKSEs who wrote a book on the murder of history way back in 1982. I think it's important to recognize these people because the one thing that I feel, and just going back to the pro strategy, to my mind the roots of fundamentalism is a question that we, as you pointed out, we struggled with it all the time. We discussed it every dinner party, we discussed it everywhere. And we don't understand it. People in my generation, for example, the girls were not wearing any hijab. They even dropped the debata. But my daughter's generation is different. They're all wearing hijab. I went to one university to give a lecture the other day and all the girls were wearing hijab. Half the boys had beers. Now I don't think this was a university. This was a rich university, not even a poor university. Lambs, for example, contends with fundamentalism all the time. I think fundamentalism is an idea and a somehow. And we have to talk about it. Objectives and resolution came very early as you talked about it. We mentioned Amdiraids. And first Amdiraids in 1955. Yeah. So we have a long history of fundamentalism and schools are very little to do with it. People attributed to Ziaulag, I don't agree. I think curriculum reform is very important, certainly. But when you send kids to these schools, what do you expect? We've all been to public schools and seen them and they're terrible. Other people have worked in, for example, La Basra Sheet, Pixia working in public schools, the reform, lots of people are working on them. But unfortunately, we can't make a dent. The size of the liberal is shrinking in the country. Right now, the liberals on Salman Tasi's death hold, however, Kulli will raise 200 people. Asma Jahangir has kind of given up Sheet calls for something. Just to come back to one little point. Why we worked in the growth framework the way we did and I strongly stand by it. All the donors were very angry with me because they didn't put education in the growth framework. That's why I asked. Right? And I stand by it. We don't need to put it. The roots of fundamental lie in our bureaucratic structures and in our cities. The way we configure them. And that's a big debate and that hasn't been taken up. Michael Guglerman talked about demographics. Yes, indeed, 90 million kids out there under the age of 20. And I said this in American television once. If you don't do anything about them, which is employment. I don't care about education, employment. If you don't give them employment, they're going to come for you. We can't stand in the way. Thank you. Always count on you to be provocative. One minute each to the panel and then we'll have to let our audience go. Why don't we start with you, Dr. Fox, if you have anything to add? Okay, I really appreciated all the questions this morning. I do stand by my ideas of our needing to hold together with regard to conducting research and coming up with joint ideas about solutions. Looking at the complexity and exposing the complexities that exist in Pakistan are going to help us to be able to look at how there can be some solutions, both in a small basis as well as expanding those solutions to a broader spectrum. Working in the provinces can be a challenge with regard to curriculum, but I think that can also help when we're looking at languages and customs within a particular area. So again, working within to the broader spectrum and working from the broad down to the macro level, I think that's going to be a very, very important approach for us. I can't overemphasize the importance of working with our teachers to make the education for those who are in school viable education and certainly to increase the opportunities for viable education for those who aren't in school. So thank you, everyone, for your excellent comments and questions. So I'll address Anand's question. So I think I have some hope, but also a very healthy amount of skepticism about the state. And I think I've received emails from various people, politicians, bureaucrats saying they admire this work. And so I think there are elements of the state which might be on board, but the state at large certainly is probably not at this point. So two things there. I think Pakistan's prime minister, for example, has been talking about foreign influences derailing the China-Pakistan economic corridor pretty much every day it seems like for the last month and a half. And so, again, the conspiracy entrepreneurs lie very much in the Pakistani state. So that's where my skepticism comes in. I think what needs to be done is an incremental, but the right kind of interventionist approach needs to be taken so that students can come out of these schools able to counter this kind of narrative. And so, again, if you are teaching them how to think critically, they can question that. If you teach them history in other parts of the world, they can question the version of history that's taught to them. So sort of done incrementally, sort of non-controversially as much as possible is the key here. Very briefly, getting back to the issue of the state ultimately being the key issue here, is the elephant in the room. I'd say an associated elephant in the room, if not the same one. We really haven't discussed this, is the role of the military historically, a country where the military has had a dominant role even when it doesn't run the show. Spending on the social sector has always been disproportionately low. Finally, a closing note, because hopefully this can be on a positive note. I've always been struck how Pakistanis, at least those that I meet and talk to, how they perceive education, their respect they have for it, and how even those that don't have all that much money are really insistent on getting their kids to go to school, despite the challenges. So this is a very important conversation to be having today. So thank you for including me in it. Thank you. We're already over time, so I won't say anything more than asking you to please join me in thanking the panelists and thank you for attending.