Is History a Threat? (Comment)

Erick Hobsbawm (d.2012) was a Marxist historian, a professor of history at Birkbeck College, University of London, where he taught till the end of his life. Birkbeck is an evening college where most of the students belong to the working class and continue with studies to improve their educational qualifications. Conscious of the condition of students who attended his lectures after a hard day of physical labour, he devised lectures on the history of Europe to create emancipatory thought. His four books use history as a tool to comprehend present-day Europe. They are titled The Age of Capital, The Age of Industrial Revolution, The Age of Revolution and The Age of Extreme. Besides these four books, he has published a number of papers and essays that attempt to build a new historical consciousness. There are other progressive historians besides Hobsbawm who believe that history can be liberating if it is not written in the service of the rulers of the time. It is also not a static and depressing account of the past but is dynamic and constantly changing. While history tells the story of unjust rulers and the institutions they created, it also reveals how the rulers and their unjust institutions meet their end. The reign of absolute kingship where the king was considered the Viceregal God, brutal military dictatorships, and exploitative economic systems that lasted for centuries with the aim of torturing and subduing the common working people were all destroyed over time, especially when people joined forces and resisted them to gradually establish a just order.

Impact of public-private-partnership programs on student's learning outcomes: evidence from a Quasi-experiment

Learning outcomes refer to the performance of the students in academic tests pertaining to the respective grade level. In Pakistan, survey evidences from Annual Status of Education Report (ASER) show a significant dispersion in learning outcomes of public schools as compared With private sector counterpart. The perceived results of learning outcomes in private schools very clear but less evidence is found for educational outcome of schools run under public-private partnership programs. This becomes especially relevant when status of curricular, co- curricular, and extra-curricular activities is compared between public school, private schools, and schools run under public private partnership. In recent literature, it is found that schools taken up by public-private partnership have been providing a better learning environment — Infrastructure Rehabilitation and Development, Administrative changes, Academic Innovation and Flaming, Teacher Reform and Student Affairs - is perceived to have a positive impact on learning outcomes. It is to investigate and document that the investments in these areas are justifiable. To promote this fact, we conduct a quasi—experiment to examine the profiles of students in a public-private partnership school at Karachi (running under Zindagi Trust program) and a public school (as counterfactual) in the same neighbourhood. We also recorded the household and socioeconomic characteristics to create a good set of control variables. The propensity—score results show that public—private partnership school is performing better than that of comparison group in attaining learning outcomes thus showing positive effects of PPP. Finally, the study probed into household and parental covariates of student‘s educational outcomes to enhance internal validity of results