Education crisis

This is not the first time that PM Shehbaz Sharif has talked about an education emergency and his predecessors also paid lip-service to the problem. Sadly, they, for the most part, did not go beyond that. Over 28 million children remain out of school in Pakistan. In Sindh despite huge budgetary allocations and induction of many new teachers, more than six million children were not in school as of 2022. If a social audit of the so-called functional schools is conducted, we would likely learn that many are not, in fact, functional. Out of actually functional schools, the majority would be found imparting low quality education. Boring and outdated methods which waste the children’s talent and render them unproductive are also major issues. One often hears rhetoric about imposing an education emergency but nothing practical can be expected, particularly since education has now been delegated to the provinces.

Gulsher Panhwer

Johi