The result of the class 9 exams in government schools in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa shows how much we must struggle to move ahead in education. Educationists across the country have been warning for years that our education system lags far behind the world and that students can simply not succeed through rote learning alone. This is more an indictment of our teaching methods, since this is the only way teachers here know how to teach, notably at government schools which have over a hundred students in many classrooms and extremely poor equipment to back teachers. This may also not be entirely the fault of teaching staff either who receive little to no rewards for the work they do and negligible training for their craft.
In the last board exam for class 9 in KP, 51 per cent of students appearing in the test are reported to have failed it. This is in contrast with private schools where 74 percent of students cleared the exam. Teachers and school administrators say that the main reason was that during the exam the questions were set not so much on the basis of rote learning, but on the notion of concepts and the students’ understanding of them. The exam pattern has not essentially changed, but students were apparently not made familiar with the new style in which they would be tested. It is a fact that each government has failed to raise standards to a level through which these students would be able to clear them through good conceptual learning over the coming years.
When teachers depend on rote-learning and when schools are either for profit or are run by governments not interested in teaching the young, invariably the students will be a reflection of the entire education system. There is a need for learning through concepts and setting high standards of education for students. The effort must begin at primary levels and then move up so that we do not get such results. To be fair to students, it is the government and its education system that has failed them instead of the other way around. We need an education system that focuses on creativity and critical thinking, not on turning students into sheep only capable of memorizing textbooks. When policy papers are written lamenting the standard of learning of our students, they must also focus on the standard of teaching of our schools. The rot starts at an institutional level.
