Challenges in education system tragic: Shafqat Mahmood

Federal Minister for Education and Professional Training Shafqat Mahmood lamented that despite the passage of seventy two years since the creation of Pakistan, the country’s education sector was facing challenges which, in his words, is a great tragedy.

He was addressing the inaugural session of the Karachi Literature Festival’s 11th edition on Friday at a local hotel. Speaking on the occasion, speakers mentioned that 22 million were out-of-school children in Pakistan. According to a World Bank’s report, he said, ‘learning poverty’ means being unable to read and understand a simple text by age 10. However, there was no discussion in the session about the quality of education being imparted to students in public schools in Pakistan.

“On this occasion, I am not going to make a political statement because it is beyond politics. The state has neglected the education sector,” he said. “However, the federal ministry is trying to start multiple schools in shifts in which more children could get access to education. But it’s just the beginning; we need to do more for education.”

He added: “I blame myself too as we have been trying to educate children of our nation in three different systems of education.”

Talking about the system of education, the minister highlighted that a large segment of the public schools taught the government’s approved curriculum until matriculation. “Then we have elite private schools where around eight million children are getting education.”

Talking about madrasas, he lamented that they were “the poorest of the poor system of education” as they had been “neglected by authorities for the past many decades”. But nobody, unfortunately, was ready to take the responsibility to rectify these systems and make them uniform, he lamented.

“These three different systems of education teach three different curriculums. The elite schools produce students with international certifications, the children studying at public schools receive national certifications, and the students of madrasas complete their education with complete different courses,” he said.

“The federal ministry of education has started to correct it for the well-being of children. We have established the National Bureau of Curriculum that prepared textbooks for the primary and in the coming days every school in Pakistan will get the same curriculum,” the minister promised.

He said the federal ministry of education had taken an initiative to provide professional trainings to 15 million out-of-school children under the age of 20. “On the special directives of Prime Minister Imran Khan, 50,000 undergraduate students have been awarded with scholarships worth Rs5 billion,” he told the audience. He concluded that a lot of things were needed to be fixed in the education sector and the federal ministry “has been trying to fix the problems”.