Govt to hold curriculum conference soon

Islamabad : The federal government had decided to hold National Curriculum Conference to get input from top educationists about Single National Curriculum (SNC) which has so far received a divided opinion from the federating units.

According to the details, the government is fully aware of the controversies surrounding the issue of SNC so it wants to get input from the educationists to resolve this issue with consensus among all the stakeholders.

SNC was introduced by the previous government with an aim to provide one system of education for all, in terms of curriculum, medium of instruction, and a common platform of assessment so that all children have a fair and equal opportunity to receive a high-quality education.

The initial assessment has shown that the SNC is superficial and serves an agenda and would erase all ethnic identities and regional languages. It looks like a way to roll back the 18th Amendment jointly passed by the political parties.

The previous government while introducing SNC had stated that through SNC it had provided some minimum learning standards for students of all grades and except for a few books like Islamiat and Urdu, private schools were at great liberty to design and draft their own books keeping in consideration the minimum learning standards.

An official said there is still a massive confusion regarding the mediums of instruction in the SNC so these kinds of issues must be addressed at the earliest.

“It was later revealed that so many people who were said to have been consulted in bringing about SNC were actually not consulted at all,” he said.

The teachers at the private schools raised their concerns about implementing the SNC in the private schools because their students’ level of understanding is more advanced than the SNC assumes.

They maintained that much more work needed to be done in Pakistan to understand the relationship between the SNC and the Cambridge syllabus, which had been constructed from an extensive knowledge of students’ capabilities.

Minister for Planning and Development Ahsan Iqbal has pointed out various issues, especially in the history books, and raised questions about the intentions of those who included such stuff in the national curriculum.