Official wants hike in budget for education

TIMERGARA: District Education Officer (Male), Lower Dir, Ghulam Nabi Khan, on Wednesday said that the provincial government should increase annual budget for the education sector to enhance literacy rate and quality of education in the province.

Talking to The News, the DEO said that keeping in view the existing rapid growth in population in Pakistan it was almost impossible to increase literacy rate and improve standard of education at the public sector schools.

He said the government should spend more funds on elementary and secondary, higher and technical education if it desired human resource development.

The official believed that burden of books on students, teaching of multiple languages like Urdu, Pashto, English and Arabic in schools, overloaded classrooms and shortage of teachers and infrastructure had adversely affected the teaching and learning processes.

He said that higher budget allocation was the only solution to improve education system in the country. “My personal experience shows that until we enforce integrated syllabus and a uniform medium of instruction in our schools, we will not be able to improve education standard,” Ghulam Nabi said, adding that class-based education had been destroying foundations of the nation. The DEO said that drastic changes were needed for overhauling of the system as, according to him, the existing teachers’ training programme also needed reforms. He said the teachers’ training did not meet the challenges of the changing world.