Education in a country is considered
to be the back bone in the social and economical development of a country. It
is therefore important for the country to have the best possible education
system. It is very hard for countries with bad and in effective education
system to develop and prosper. Unfortunately Pakistan is considered to be among
those countries with worst education. According to the 2012-2013 survey the
literacy rate of Pakistan was 55%. This is an alarming low literacy rate which
contributes to economic, social, political and technological crisis.
Currently Pakistan has three systems
of education, private school, government schools and Madressas. Our country is
heading forward with three different education systems. Students in private
schools are completely different from those taught in government and Madressas.
They all have completely different setups. The government schools are failure
now a day as they lack the basic facilities necessary for quality education and
it is due to this reason that government schools student who mostly belong to
poor families don’t get enough opportunities compared to those students who are
given better education in private schools.
The other reason why the government
schools are a failure now days is because of a lot of political intervention in
government school staff recruitment. Teachers of government schools are
recruited by politician. These teachers don’t even have the qualifications of
being a teacher but yet due to corrupt system in place teachers are recruited.
Teacher who teach to primary schools student are just matriculate with zero
teaching skills. This is the reason why government school student can’t even
read and write in a way the private school students does.
In recent report it was found that
the provincial government established 48,277 school in 27 districts of Sindh province out of this total 4,540 schools are non operational and 2,181 school were found as ghost schools. It means that the
schools were only present in government files but there were no schools on the
ground. This is one of the results of poor education system. There is no proper
monitoring system present in the country that can have check on the schools and
its staff.
Now the main reason why Pakistan
still has poor education system is due to the lack of sufficient funds for
education. Pakistan has poor relations with the neighboring India due to which
it spends almost 80% of its budget on its defense. The remaining 20% is
distributed on other development works and very little proportion is left for
education. Pakistan spends 2% of its total budget on its education which needs
to be raise to at least 7% or 8%.
I think it is time for government to
take education seriously and form policy that could cut the roots of illiteracy
from the ground. Ministry of education should set a proper monitoring system
which could monitor the schools and staff. The government should put an end to
three different kinds of education system and bring one but the best system.
The whole country should have one single syllabus for primary level schools.
Recruitment of teachers should be purely merit based rather than nepotism. The
government should set teacher training programs throughout the country. In
short the government should do all it can to eliminate illiteracy from the
country.
