After a Century of Schools

Kashmir’s Search for Education Worthy of Its Children

When one writes about education in Kashmir, one is not merely writing about schools. One is writing about a society’s long and often wounded struggle to protect its children from poverty, isolation, humiliation, political uncertainty, cultural erosion, and narrow forms of success. One is writing about the anxious hope of parents, the quiet stamina of teachers, the unfinished promise of public institutions, the expanding but uneven role of private schooling, and the deeper question that every serious civilization must eventually ask: what kind of human being are we trying to form?

For Kashmir, education has never been only a technical arrangement. It has been a route into literacy, dignity, employment, public life, self-respect, and sometimes survival itself. It has opened doors that were once closed to rural children, poor households, first-generation learners, girls, and socially marginalised communities. Yet it has also carried within itself the ambiguities of modern schooling: the narrowing of learning into examinations, the conversion of knowledge into credentials, the reduction of aspiration into government service or market mobility, and the gradual displacement of older forms of moral, linguistic, spiritual, and craft-based formation.

The story, therefore, cannot be told as simple progress or simple decline. It is a story of aspiration and uneven gains, of real achievement and real incompletion. Most contemporary public data are available for the Union Territory of Jammu and Kashmir as a whole, while the Valley has its own social, historical, and cultural lineaments. That distinction matters. Yet Kashmir’s education question cannot be separated from the wider policy structure of J&K: curriculum boards, public finance, recruitment, teacher deployment, private-school regulation, higher education policy, early childhood programmes, digital monitoring, and the effects of disruption all operate within that larger frame.

The task before us is to see the whole: the longue durée of inheritance, the achievements of the public project, the energy and anxieties of the private sector, the wounds beneath the numbers, and, above all, the telos of education itself.

The Older Inheritance and the Modern Turn

Before modern schooling became the dominant form, learning in Kashmir lived through a plurality of institutions and practices: pathshalas, maktabs, madrasas, Sanskritic learning, Persianate traditions, Sufi and religious instruction, family transmission, apprenticeship, craft, poetry, memory, and community-based moral formation. These forms did not produce mass literacy. They often excluded the poor and girls. They were not romantic utopias. Yet they carried an idea that modern schooling has often forgotten: learning was not simply information acquisition. It was tied to adab, conduct, devotion, language, work, memory, and social duty.

This older world began to shift sharply in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Historical work on Kashmir’s educational transition notes that under Dogra rule, substantive state-led intervention in education remained negligible until the late 1880s, and that there was only one state-run middle school as late as 1890. The same study describes the later rise of a more bureaucratic schooling culture, with prescribed textbooks, inspection, teacher recruitment rules, certificates, and examinations gradually becoming central to the meaning of education. Missionary schools, especially those associated with the Tyndale-Biscoe tradition, brought a visible model of character-building, physical discipline, public responsibility, and social reform, though such accounts must also be read critically because they carried colonial and missionary assumptions.

Alongside missionary institutions, Muslim reformist initiatives played a crucial role in awakening educational consciousness among Kashmiri Muslims. The Anjuman-i-Nusratul Islam and related efforts were not merely institutional episodes; they were attempts to answer a civilizational anxiety: how could a community preserve religious rootedness while acquiring the tools of modern learning, representation, and public dignity? That question remains alive.

The modern school widened opportunity, but it also inaugurated a pattern that still troubles Kashmir: education became too closely tied to examinations, clerical employment, and status. The prescribed textbook became, in too many cases, not an aid to curriculum but the curriculum itself. Memorization for reproduction at examination became a hallmark of schooling; local histories, oral traditions, folklore, crafts, ecological knowledge, and religious epistemologies were pushed to the margins. The modern school thus brought both emancipation and amnesia. It opened the world and, at times, thinned the child’s relationship with place.

The Public Project and Its Democratic Promise

After 1947, education became one of the central promises of public life. The founding of the University of Jammu and Kashmir in 1948, later bifurcated in 1969 into the University of Kashmir at Srinagar and the University of Jammu at Jammu, marked a decisive step in the institutionalisation of higher education. The Jammu and Kashmir Board of School Education Act of 1975 gave the school system another formal pillar, establishing a board to regulate, control, and develop school education up to the higher secondary level. (University of Kashmir)

The public school became one of the great democratic instruments of the region. It carried children from rural, poor, and first-generation homes into literacy, teaching, medicine, engineering, administration, higher studies, and public employment. Kashmir’s educated middle class did not appear by accident. It was made by public investment, family sacrifice, community respect for learning, and the determined service of teachers who often worked in difficult terrain and uncertain times.

This achievement should not be dismissed. In an age where cynicism is often mistaken for sophistication, it is necessary to say plainly that public education in Kashmir has changed lives. It has given children language, confidence, mobility, and a place in the world. It has enabled families to imagine futures not available to their grandparents.

Yet the public project also carried weaknesses. It often expanded buildings faster than it built intellectual culture. It produced certificates faster than it produced capability. It offered schooling without always ensuring understanding. It generated graduates without always creating meaningful livelihoods. It made education deeply desired, but not always deeply trusted.

This is the paradox: Kashmir has loved education, sacrificed for it, and invested hope in it; yet too many families remain unsure whether the school, especially the public school, can still form the child deeply, protect the child tenderly, and prepare the child wisely.

The Scale of the Present

The present system is large, active, and socially consequential. UDISE+ 2024–25 data reported in September 2025 records 24,192 schools, 26.54 lakh students, 1.67 lakh teachers, and a pupil-teacher ratio of 16:1 in J&K. UDISE-based report cards also list 10,554 primary schools, 9,145 upper primary schools, 3,185 secondary schools, and 1,308 higher secondary schools, with government schools accounting for about 54.9 percent of enrolment in classes 1 to 12 and private unaided schools about 44.9 percent. (dailyexcelsior.com)

These are not small numbers. They represent a vast social commitment. They also reveal an important truth: private education in Kashmir is not a marginal phenomenon. Parents are voting with their feet, though not always against public education in principle. Often they are voting for perceived regularity, English communication, discipline, accountability, peer culture, and a sense of seriousness. Many private schools have worked hard and built trust. Some have provided continuity when public systems were uneven. Some have fostered confidence, communication, and aspiration.

But the private sector also carries risks: high fees, social sorting, underpaid teachers, parental anxiety, narrow test preparation, exclusion of poorer children, and the subtle conversion of education into a commodity. A society cannot allow quality schooling to become a privilege purchased by those who can pay. Nor should it lazily treat private schools as enemies. Kashmir needs a wiser compact: the public sector must guarantee a strong floor for every child, while the private sector must be held to fairness, transparency, teacher dignity, child protection, inclusion, and educational purpose.

Recent policy documents show that the state understands that the next phase cannot be only about opening schools. The J&K budget features for 2025–26 include proposals for 5,000 kindergartens, modern kindergarten buildings, free textbooks for 5.75 lakh elementary students, vocational education in 554 schools, 1,000 vocational labs, district-level Vidya Samiksha Kendras, online attendance monitoring, ICT labs and smart classrooms in high and higher secondary schools, teacher capacity-building, PM SHRI schools, solarisation, a dropout policy, counselling centres, and pre-primary development.

The same question is now entering higher education. The J&K Private Universities Bill, 2026 frames private universities as a way to supplement government efforts in higher education while regulating governance, management, standards, student protection, and safeguards against commercialisation. This direction is salutary only if private universities become serious institutions of teaching, research, innovation, and service. If they merely sell degrees, they will not solve the crisis; they will deepen it.

The Challenges Behind the Numbers

The first challenge is the gap between access and continuity. J&K’s primary gross enrolment ratio appears strong, but UDISE-based indicators show weaker participation at later stages: primary GER is recorded at 113.7 percent against the national 90.9 percent, while secondary is 66.1 percent against 78.7 percent nationally, and higher secondary is 44.8 percent against 58.4 percent nationally. Retention also declines sharply by higher secondary level, where J&K is recorded at 38.2 percent against 47.2 percent nationally.

This means children are entering the system, but too many are not moving through it with strength, confidence, and continuity. Access is not the same as formation. Enrolment is not the same as learning. Attendance is not the same as belonging. A child may be statistically present and educationally absent.

The second challenge is the uneven use of public infrastructure. UDISE+ reporting shows that zero-enrolment schools in J&K increased to 146 in 2024–25, while single-teacher schools rose to 1,371, serving more than 32,000 students. This is not simply an argument for closure. In mountain regions, border areas, scattered habitations, and poor communities, a small school may still be socially necessary. But it is a sign that planning must become more precise: school mapping, transport, clustering, seasonal hostels, teacher-sharing, and community consultation must work together. (dailyexcelsior.com)

The third challenge is teacher deployment and classroom support. A good average pupil-teacher ratio can conceal local shortages, subject gaps, single-teacher schools, and uneven quality. Kashmir does not only need more teachers in some places; it needs the right teachers in the right schools, with subject preparation, mentoring, professional dignity, and freedom from excessive non-teaching burdens. A system that treats teachers as clerks, data-entry operators, or instruments of compliance cannot then ask them to become intellectual and moral mentors.

The fourth challenge is digital inequality. Smart classrooms and dashboards may help, but only when electricity, devices, connectivity, teacher training, local-language content, and child-centred pedagogy meet in the actual classroom. UDISE-based reporting for J&K lists computer availability at 43 percent of schools and internet at 49 percent, below national figures, while accessibility indicators remain troubling, including low levels of ramps with handrails and CWSN-friendly toilets. A screen does not improve learning by itself. Technology without pedagogy is spectacle. Data without judgment is noise.

The fifth challenge is disruption. Kashmir’s schools have repeatedly faced closures due to unrest, restrictions, conflict, weather, and the COVID period. Reporting from 2020 described empty classrooms, parental fear, makeshift community classes, volunteer tutoring, and the reality that repeated disruption had become a familiar part of student life. (The New Humanitarian) A society that has lived through such interruption must treat educational continuity as civic infrastructure. Children should not lose months of learning whenever public life contracts.

The sixth challenge is the old examination culture. The modern system inherited a textbook-and-examination model that helped standardise education but also narrowed it. Too many children still learn to reproduce answers rather than ask better questions. Too many schools prepare students for marks more than understanding. Too many parents, having suffered scarcity themselves, understandably confuse examination success with educational flourishing. Yet a society cannot examine its way into wisdom.

The seventh challenge is the school-to-work mismatch. Families invest in education because they hope it will lead to dignity and livelihood. When degrees do not lead to meaningful work, education becomes a source of frustration, even moral exhaustion. Kashmir needs higher and vocational education that speaks to its real economy and ecology: horticulture, crafts, tourism, mountain environments, renewable energy, public health, early childhood care, languages, disaster management, digital services, design, cultural industries, and local enterprise.

First Principles: What Is a Kashmiri Education For?

Before asking what reforms are necessary, we need to proceed by stating as clearly as possible what our educational goals are. This is not a bureaucratic preliminary. It is an axiological necessity. A fact or a statistic can never, by itself, dictate what ought to be done. The human being must first be understood.

From an Islamic point of view, education begins neither with the market nor with the state, but with the command to read in the name of the Lord who created (Qurʾān 96:1). Knowledge is not severed from Lordship. It is not a neutral accumulation of information. It is a discipline of perception, gratitude, responsibility, and transformation. The human being is honoured by Allah (Qurʾān 17:70), entrusted as khalīfah on earth (Qurʾān 2:30), and called to carry amānah with humility rather than arrogance.

A Kashmiri education worthy of this anthropology cannot be merely utilitarian. It must prepare children for livelihood, but not reduce them to economic units. It must teach science, mathematics, technology, and language, but not at the expense of moral imagination, ecological responsibility, aesthetic sensibility, and spiritual refinement. It must enable mobility, but not deracination. It must open the world, but not estrange the child from home.

The school, then, is not simply a delivery mechanism. It is a place of psychagogy, the guidance of the soul. It should cultivate literacy and numeracy, but also adab, sabr, shukr, intellectual honesty, ecological tenderness, courage, and khidmah. It should form children who can read a text, a river, an orchard, a machine, a poem, a public problem, and their own inward state with growing discernment.

The Arabic-Andalusian adab tradition sharpens this point with a severe and necessary reminder: knowledge is not acquitted by being possessed. It must answer for what it became. Abū Isḥāq al-Ilbīrī writes:

فَوَاظِبْهُ وَخُذْ بِالجِدِّ فِيهِ

فَإِنْ أَعْطَاكَهُ اللهُ انْتَفَعْتَا

وَإِنْ أَعْطَيْتَ فِيهِ طَوِيلَ بَاعٍ

وَقَالَ النَّاسُ إِنَّكَ قَدْ عَلِمْتَا

فَلَا تَأْمَنْ سُؤَالَ اللهِ عَنْهُ

بِتَوْبِيخٍ: عَلِمْتَ فَمَا عَمِلْتَا

فَرَأْسُ العِلْمِ تَقْوَى اللهِ حَقًّا

وَلَيْسَ بِأَنْ يُقَالَ: لَقَدْ رَأَسْتَا

“Persevere in knowledge and take it up with seriousness;

if Allah grants it to you, you will benefit.

Even if you are given a wide reach in it,

and people say, ‘You have surely learned,’

do not feel safe from Allah’s questioning of it

with the rebuke: ‘You knew—so what did you do?’

For the summit of knowledge is truly taqwā of Allah,

not that it be said, ‘You have become a leader.’”

—Abū Isḥāq al-Ilbīrī, Manẓūmat al-Ilbīrī, my translation.

This is an exacting verse for Kashmir’s educational moment. A century of schools can produce literacy, certificates, institutions, careers, and a visible educated class; yet the deeper question remains: what did this knowledge become? Did it become ʿamal, khidmah, taqwā, public justice, ecological care, teacher dignity, inclusion of the disabled child, safety for the poor, and tenderness toward the learner who struggles? A system may proudly say, “we have educated,” but the moral question returns with Qurʾānic force: having known, did we act?

This is why education cannot be judged by institutional visibility alone. Buildings matter, enrolment matters, budgets matter, examinations matter, and data matter. But they are not the final measure. The final measure is whether knowledge becomes responsibility. A Kashmiri education worthy of its children must not merely produce those whom people call learned; it must form those whose learning becomes taqwā, service, courage, and repair.

The Work Ahead: From Schooling to Formation

The public sector must remain the moral anchor of education. Its first duty is not competition with private schools; it is justice. Every child, whether in Kupwara, Shopian, Srinagar, Baramulla, Anantnag, Bandipora, Kulgam, Budgam, Pulwama, or a remote hamlet beyond easy visibility, must have access to a safe and meaningful school.

The first priority is foundational learning. National policy already places strong emphasis on foundational literacy and numeracy, with NIPUN Bharat aiming for every child to attain foundational literacy and numeracy by the end of Grade 3. (Press Information Bureau) Kashmir should treat this not as a slogan but as a social mission. Every primary school should know which children can read, understand, count, speak, listen, observe, draw, move, and express themselves. Early childhood centres and Bal Vidyalayas must be staffed by trained educators, not merely decorated with bright furniture. Play, rhythm, stories, mother tongue, nutrition, movement, and affection are not ornamental; they are the roots of later learning.

The second priority is compassionate rationalisation. Low-enrolment and zero-enrolment schools cannot be ignored, but blind closure would harm remote and poor communities. The better path is humane clustering: shared campuses where possible, safe transport, local learning centres, seasonal hostels, community libraries, digital access points, and teacher-sharing models. Efficiency without mercy becomes violence; mercy without planning becomes drift.

The third priority is teacher renewal. Teacher training should move from episodic workshops to continuous mentoring. The best teachers should become master mentors. DIETs should become living academic centres rather than administrative extensions. Training should focus on reading instruction, mathematical understanding, multilingual classrooms, adolescent counselling, inclusive education, assessment for understanding, art, craft, environmental learning, and the relational work of building trust.

The fourth priority is resilient schooling. Kashmir requires education continuity plans for snow, floods, heat, unrest, internet shutdowns, road closures, and health emergencies. Learning continuity should include printed home-learning packets, school and community libraries, offline digital content, radio and audio lessons, community tutor networks, local assessment support, and safe reopening protocols. Resilience should not mean expecting children and teachers to absorb endless disruption silently. It should mean designing institutions that protect learning when public life is strained.

The fifth priority is secondary and higher secondary strengthening. Adolescents need more than textbooks. They need career guidance, counselling, laboratories, libraries, sports, arts, safe transport, menstrual health support, civic learning, life skills, and exposure to real work. Girls’ continuation through secondary and higher secondary education should be treated as one of the most important indicators of social health.

The sixth priority is a wider definition of quality. A good Kashmiri school should produce literacy, numeracy, scientific temper, ethical judgment, ecological responsibility, respect for diversity, practical skill, aesthetic taste, and spiritual seriousness. Children should learn Kashmiri, Urdu, English, and other languages with pride and purpose. They should encounter rivers, forests, farms, crafts, architecture, poetry, local history, and the wider world. Understanding is far more likely to be achieved when the student encounters material in a variety of forms and contexts. Rich, generative ideas must be revisited time and again. Less is more when less is deep.

The seventh priority is assessment reform. We should move from one-dimensional metrics toward performances of understanding, contextualised assessment, processfolios, apprentice-style assessment, and feedback conducted over time with rich materials in the child’s own environment. Students should become partners in the processes of assessment, not merely subjects of judgment. Assessment should reveal growth, not merely rank anxiety.

The eighth priority is private-sector responsibility. Private schools must accept that they are part of a public trust. They may be privately managed, but they educate society’s children. Transparent fees, fair teacher pay, child-safety systems, inclusion policies, parent communication, and accountable governance are not optional refinements. A school that underpays teachers while charging high fees weakens the moral basis of education. A school that produces marks without kindness has misunderstood its work.

Private schools should also root learning in Kashmir’s life. They can build serious programmes around local ecology, water, orchards, crafts, architecture, poetry, climate risk, peace education, and community service. In higher education, private universities should become research hubs, teacher-training centres, innovation spaces, and partners in local development, not degree shops. Partnership is welcome; abdication of public responsibility is not.

Toward a Culture Worthy of the Child

Kashmir has spent more than a century building schools. The task now is to build a culture of education worthy of its children. This culture must be rigorous without being harsh, modern without being rootless, spiritual without being narrow, practical without being merely utilitarian, and ambitious without forgetting the poor.

We must resist the false comfort of numbers alone. Buildings matter. Enrolment matters. Budgets matter. Dashboards matter. But education is not finally measured by institutional visibility. Its deepest fruits are often qualitative: a child who reads with understanding, a teacher who restores confidence, a girl who remains in school, a boy who learns tenderness instead of aggression, a student who discovers an authentic domain of excellence, a village that begins to trust its school again, a graduate who returns to serve rather than merely escape.

The history of Kashmiri education has known qabḍ and basṭ: constriction and openings, difficulty and release. That rhythm should not make us fatalistic. It should make us sober and hopeful. In the Islamic imagination, hope is not passivity. It is a disciplined form of trust, inseparable from action. We do not despair because the work is unfinished. We accept the work because the children are an amānah.

The true measure of Kashmir’s educational progress will not be the number of institutions alone. It will be whether a child in any neighbourhood, village, orchard belt, mountain settlement, old city lane, or marginal household can read deeply, think honestly, work skilfully, live peacefully, care for the earth, honour the sacred, and grow into a human being of courage and grace.

That is the work ahead. It is not small. But neither is the promise of a child.