KARACHI – A webinar was held on 06 January 2021 on “Challenges in Education in Pakistan” under the auspices of the Karachi Council on Foreign Relations (KCFR) with honourable Shafqat Mahmood, Federal Minister for Education, Professional Training, National Heritage & Culture participating. Chaired by Ikram Sehgal Chairman KCFR, the event was moderated by CEO KCFR, Cdre (Retd) Sadeed A. Malik.
The honourable Federal Minister said that over the last 73 years the State has not invested in education as it should have. He said that apart from the situation prevailing we were suddenly faced with the coronavirus emergency, we made a functional and effective organisation through which some fundamental decisions we taken, when to close schools, when to open schools, etc. Within 15 days of closure of schools in March we were able to launch ‘Tele School’ taking an entire channel from Pakistan Television Corporation. In higher education on-line learning was encouraged. Just a few days back we took a decision to gradually open schools from the 18th to the 25th of Jan 2021 and by the 1st of next month all education institutions will reopen.
With our minds focussed on distance learning we put in place projects to develop new content, these innovations are on-going. We have started a blended learning project in Islamabad which is going to combine different kinds of technologies to determine which one is the appropriate technology and at which age. While the future is stressful because of COVID, it has created opportunities as we have started ‘distance learning’ and we hope that within the next 6 months we will be able to develop new content and new ways to give to the children. Then there is a huge problem with ‘learning poverty’ which is something the World Bank came up with, which is actually the amount of learning that a student has to attain over a certain period of time but unfortunately the figures for Pakistan at 75% were very poor.
There are other problems such as societal problems and we have a huge apartheid-like situation in education where you have the elite schools, then the low fee paying private schools, there is a huge portion of the government schools and then there are the Madrassah schools. Each one is going in their own direction. Madrassa reform has been a huge effort, we had a number of meetings with Ittihad e Tanzeem Madaris and reached an agreement that all madrassa over the next 4 to 5 year period will also be teaching according to the National Curriculum and that their students will be taking part in the national examinations, like Matriculation, FA or FSc.
The Federal Minister then took some questions from participants after which Chairman Ikram Sehgal KCFR thanked the minister and said that he believed there was a problem with education because of the 18th Amendment. “We do not want to go down the way of the Yugoslav model which suffered a racial and religious divide. I think we need to have a common minimum programme to address our problems. There are things counter-productive to the continuation of good education, for example, textbooks. The 18th Amendment must be modified to have at least a Common Minimum Programme as far as education is concerned.”. Continuing, Mr. Sehgal said that having mortar and bricks schools in the pandemic is not enough. We can do double shifts at schools, we can do stage wise alternate on-line classes, etc. The most important thing is the common minimum programme and also the textbook problem, I think you really need to re-visit your policy about textbooks because if you hand over the textbooks to the provincial level you are going to have a problem of the highest order as is already happening as we see it.”
So thank you very much Shafqat Sahib for gracing this event and we would like to have you with us again to discuss this important subject. Thank you.
