Daily Times

ISLAMABAD: Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf’s (PTI) minister for higher education in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa said his party was committed to implementing a uniform education system throughout the province amid the opposition’s reservations that the vital sector still experiences serious problems.

PTI Chairman Imran Khan back in 2013 had said, “No country in the world has separate education systems for the rich and the poor. Reforming the education system is the real jihad … it may be difficult, but not impossible.” Minister for Higher Education, Archives, Libraries, Information and Public Relations Mushtaq Ahmed Ghani told Daily Times that his party had done a lot of work to improve the fledgling education sector they inherited.

“We have shifted the government-run schools from Urdu to English medium. And we have hired 30,000 qualified teachers through the National Testing Service (NTS) and plans are being made to recruit another 15,000 to 20,000 teachers,” he added. He said the PTI-led government was striving to bring the seminary’s education on a par with other institutions where they would teach religious education along with modern education.

Ibrash Pasha, an educationist, said a uniform education policy meant that all educational institutions and service providers would be equal, in terms of their curriculum, teachers training, facilities and infrastructure.

“But the ground reality is different. We have state-run schools with different medium of language, like Pashto, Urdu and English. But the curriculum of private schools is different,” he noted.

Mian Zia-ur-Rehman, member of the Provincial Assembly (MPA) from Pakistan Muslim League-Nawaz (PML-N), said that introducing a uniform education system was a distant dream. He said that the provincial government had even shattered the education system that existed. “The PTI had a campaign on education emergency which didn’t produce any result. They are playing with the sentiments of people,” he added.

Malik Riaz Khan, an MPA from Jamiat Ulema-e-Islam-Fazl (JUI-F), said, “Forget about education reforms, the entire tenure of PTI is spent in protests and sit-ins and voters are now virtually fed up and don’t accept this trend anymore.”

The PTI increased the education budget from Rs 67 billion to Rs 136 billion but the education sector didn’t see a jot of positive change, he claimed.

“KP’s total budget is Rs 240 billion and a lion’s share of Rs 136 billion is allocated for education sector, but we don’t see any output. The provincial government has failed to reform even the health sector,” he remarked.

He said still the curriculum of private and government-run schools were separate, which “tends to create a gulf among students and leave an [adverse] impact on their careers”.

“Private schools are far better in dissemination of education because they teach students with a business point of view with excellent output, while the government-run schools are just a time pass,” he added.

He said the provincial government had been claiming on the social media that students from private schools were shifting to government-run schools, which was not true.

Mian Iftikhar Hussain, a senior leader of Awami National Party (ANP), said the education sector had experienced a visible downfall since the PTI took over.

“Now the provincial government intends to privatise the government-run schools, and if they want to shift the entire responsibility to the private sector then what will the government do?” he questioned.

He said students with poor background preferred government-run schools and if the PTI privatised those schools then it would mean that they were closing the doors of education on the poor students.

He said that measures adopted by the provincial government had left a negative impact on the vital education sector.

However, Pasha said that some positive improvements had been brought to the medium of instruction – from Urdu to English.

He said the third category was seminaries, which teach purely religious education.

“A uniform education system means that people should have access to the same education with no difference in private, public or seminary education,” Pasha noted.

“We inherited the education sector, which was virtually in shambles, and we had to improve the condition of buildings and increase the number of teachers. We have brought some sort of tangible reforms in the education field,” Ghani said.

KP Minister for Elementary and Secondary Education Muhammad Atif neither returned phone calls nor replied to text messages for comments.

Published in Daily Times, November 9^th 2017.