Right to Free and Compulsory Education Act, 2012: A landmark development (Part Two)

The availability of teachers alone is the most fundamental issue as all public sector educational institutions at all levels have half what is required of the teaching staff. With this strength of educators, this gigantic exercise with 50 per cent of teachers who also need the required training remains the most significant question.

The new enactment tends to make regularization of private schools stricter than before, but mere allocation of 10 per cent quota for poor children in private schools of their areas, is no answer. Strengthening of public education will be vital area that cannot be addressed by mere cosmetic steps. Pakistan produces about 445,000 university graduates and 10,000 computer scientists every year.

Still Pakistan has one of the highest illiteracy rates in the world and the second largest out of school population (5.1 million children) after Nigeria. Literacy rate in Pakistan is said to be 37 per cent but it varies from region to region. For example, Islamabad has this at 87 per cent but it is only 20 per cent in most of Balochistan.

The question is not whether resources starved provinces are prepared for this national task, there also is the concern about their correct priorities that lost equilibrium when provincial governments abdicated their educational role to entrust this high priority job to the greedy private sector which fleeced the middle class beside creating huge flaws in their system of imparting learning.

The private sector also introduced a class-based education and promoted English to scandalously become the first academic language at the expense of all other national languages and this destroyed the cultural ethos of Pakistan.

What is actually required is to give the schools run by provincial or local governments’ credence that parents prefer these institutions over private schools. Education for all is certainly a striking idea but it is also a social dilemma and this has always to be kept in mind.

Short URL: https://www.newspakistan.pk/?p=35248

Posted by Faisal Farooq on Nov 24 2012. Filed under Education, Opinion, Pakistan. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.