Daily Times

Education determines the fate of a nation. Quality education leads to prosperity, technological advancements, political maturity, economic dynamism, and adherence to constitutional norms by cultivating a civic sense in the citizenry of a polity, while education bereft of quality, innovative, and analytical abilities yields an unemployed bulk, which is politically unconscious and economically naïve. Unfortunately, in our part of the world, the latter brand of education is in vogue.

Our education system has been surrounded by a range of complex structural, institutional and organizational problems. These multidimensional problems are deep-rooted, but they can be addressed and managed in our capacity only when our ruling elite class came out of its narrowed and petty political interests by employing genuine politically-oriented and problem-solving approaches.

Lack of training facilities for newly-recruited and in-service teachers, outdated and overloaded syllabi, outmoded pedagogical practices, poor infrastructures, massive and unbridled corruption in the recruitment of teachers to public institutions, financial constraints being faced by government schools, high dropout ratio of children due to economic pressures being faced by lower-class parents, are some of the glaring issues of public schools. Moreover, along with these problems, higher education is additionally faced a trust deficit in the people. The ever-increasing bulk of unemployed graduates has created a sense of displeasure and frustration among the citizens about higher education. How can we convince a father, who hardly meets his needs, to save some hard-earned money and send his child to college/university, when he sees in his surrounding a bunch of unemployed graduates for years? Frankly, he will go for technical and skill-based education for his child, not for university which demands high fees, but gives nothing at all except a miserable cohort of unemployed youth, which is badly incapable to compete in the professional global market.

The controversy over the syllabi is as old as this country.

Ensuring quality education is the need of the hour. This country couldn’t afford a sordid educational framework anymore. Indeed, paradigm-shifting is indispensable in learning approaches like that in our foreign policy. First and foremost, the provincial education departments should start training all teachers (newly inducted and in-service). Teachers should be incentivized by setting for them certain targets (academic and co-curricular), after achieving these targets they should be accredited officially. Early promotions and financial stimuli are the most tested options to be resorted to. Second, the controversy over the syllabi is as old as this country. In drafting syllabi, the first issue which has been time and again spearheaded is the medium of instruction. A lot of research has proved that mother-tongue should be primarily inserted in the syllabi of early classes, along with other supplementary languages, e.g. English and Urdu in our case. The syllabi should be kept thoroughly updated keeping in view the fast-moving age of scientific advancements. Moreover, a democratic and accommodative syllabus is that which inculcates moderate tendencies: civic and political sense, conceding constitutional norms, abhorring terrorism and extremism, sex education, and gender-related issues, in the young minds by drawing symbols on the cover pages, etc. The controversial SNC was initially strongly rebutted by academians as it had presented boys and girls discriminatively, showing a male-dominated psyche. Third, to bring transparency to the recruitment process of teachers, testing agencies should be depoliticized through resilient regulatory strategies. Fifth, the high dropout and out-of-school children ratio is a testament that the public schools have the worst building infrastructures. Most of the schools in the far-flung parts of the country have no proper buildings, electrically-equipped classes, libraries, and toilets. Moreover, most parents don’t send their children to school due to severe economic pressures. According to UNICEF, above 22 million children are out of school. Adequate provision of budget can resolve the schools’ bad infrastructures as well as can provide monetary incentives to parents to let them admit their children to schools.

Besides, creating a nexus of universities and industries is imperative to generate friendly employment opportunities. Unsurprisingly, the ever-widening gap between the country’s higher education and industrial zone is utterly obnoxious for both the country’s educational and industrial future. Half-baked institutions churn out half-baked research which further perpetuates not end the vicious cycle of economic instability being triggered by the fraught history of political bedlam. For avoiding this looming problem, the government should heavily invest in the research sector and should bring coordination between higher education and the industrial sector, so that the research being conducted in the university turns into economic products in one way, and provides employment to the researchers in the other way.

The writer is a student based in Mardan.