Education: An Abysmal Situation

It’s been more than fifty years since we won our independence from the British Rule. Time and again, the masses were told that Pakistan would be a sovereign state. It will provide a place to the Muslims of South

Asia to live peacefully according to their desires. It was told again and again that Pakistan would be a paradise, where there would be peace and prosperity. Ah!! None of these dreams came true and the politicians and the military rulers hijacked the gaiety of the common man. They deliberately and shamelessly ruled the country in turns and blamed each other for the tragedies of common man.

Leaving other things behind, if we only consider education, it was their greatest crime to deprive the common man from basic and higher quality education. It is believed since long, that students are the major political force and the greatest asset for any political party. Quid-e-Azam was one of the people who thought that and used students for his campaign for creating the state of Pakistan. His followers and their opponents then never allowed the students to return to their colleges for studies but used them as weapons against each other and against the state. Since the establishment of Pakistan, it has been a tradition of using students as political workers and creating law and order situations to destabilize the running government. The ban on the student unions further cultivated this culture by dismantling the neutral organizations and creating a channel for political parties to take hold on our educational institutions. Then the religious parties played their part and started to recruit students in the name of Islam. These Islamist organizations were the worst thing, which could happen to the educational institutions, because they had their own new version of Islam, devoid of tolerance. A new era began, the era of fighting and even killing each other in the name of Islam. And we are still living in this era where pupils fight with each other with the slogans of “Allah-o-Akbar” and even kill their Muslim brothers declaring them as infidels.

To add insult to injury, a caste system has been created in our education setup. The sons and daughters of the most privileged class study in Cambridge system, the less privileged ones, in private schools and appear under metric system of examination; the poor, in so called “yellow schools” with ghost teachers and lack of any sort of teaching facilities appear in the same system of examination. No one in the country, as far as I believe, trusts the Boards of Metric and Intermediate education, and yet, the people with moderate-low income have no choice, but to let their children undergo such a horrible system of examination. A system where “LUCK” is one of the greatest factors in success. What a pity! The son of a gardener will remain a gardener forever, he might become a florist, but he will never become a Brigadier or Doctor because he is never trained for that. On the other hand, the son of the Minister for foreign affairs will complete his A-levels, and will go to Europe to earn some degrees and will return to our country to rule it.
These days, we see a lot of advertisement of our nation being educated and government trying to facilitate the arrival of students to the school. But the question to ask is “ Is the government providing some quality or trying to produce more clerks?” Since the time we got rid of the British, the quality of education instead of improving, has been going on the downward slope. The major emphasis has been on the quantity rather than quality, but our system was even unable to deliver quantity, and talking about quality, it was never there. The government schools are devoid of space, good teachers and above all, sincerity of the concerned authorities. Nobody is sincerely interested in educating our children for a better future.

It is the need of the hour that drastic changes should be brought about to change this whole out-of-date system and replace it with a fresh one. In my humble view following changes are necessary.
1. All political parties should be forced to say goodbye to their student wings and all political activities inside the educational institutions should be EFFECTIVELY banned. The students should be told that serious actions whould be taken against them if they indulge in political activities.
2. Some sort of technical education should be incorporated with the primary and secondary education in order to provide simultaneous training to the children of the poor so that they can learn a living for themselves along with their education.
3. The ministers, politicians and all government officials should be forced to admit their children to the government run schools. When son of General Musharraf , Bilawal and Bakhtawar will study with the son of Allah Ditta, nobody from the school-staff will be able to show negligence in their duties.
4. The examinations of English, Urdu, Sindhi should be taken in no-learning and all-comprehension way, to lessen the burden on our children.
5. Arabic and some other European language should be included in the above-mentioned way to enable our children to become familiarized with other cultures as well.
6. Mathematics, Biology and Computer Science should be made compulsory up to the level of intermediate, so that students’ decision about their profession could be delayed to the age where they are a little bit mature.
7. System of examination should be revised and should be made 100% objective, so that no doubt remains in the minds and hearts of the students and parents about the corruption in the examination system.
8. The checked answer sheets should be available to the students to remove any doubts about transparency of the system.

I believe that this is the time when strict laws should be made to improve the situation of our education sector, making new boards is not the solution of our problems, it will only provide relief to the children of higher-middle class. To bring out the General Khuda Baksh or Dr. Allah-Dino, we need to refine and re-establish our education setup, by making it crystal clear and highly efficient. This is the only hope that the poorest of the poor will be able to see their children prosper and establish.