Educating Pakistan - By Mr. Naeem Mohammad

Educating Pakistan By Mr. Naeem Mohammad The historic non-spending on the education of a nation has finally grown up to become a big ugly ogre. A teeming young population, sardine-tin classrooms, untrained and unwilling teachers and politicians still asleep – all indicative of a nation drifting towards the great iceberg of social anarchy. The tell-tale signs of a system under incredible stress are on our TV screens every day. Dysfunctional institutions, angry people on the streets, law and order chaos, hyperinflation and an ever growing size of cabinet are few of the symptoms of the ever-increasing viscosity of the blood that runs in our national veins. The rampant esurience of the rich and the bottomless deprivation of the poor; how many more signs do we need before we will realize that educating Pakistan is no longer a priority; it is a battle for survival of a proud nation that does not know how to save its youth. Perhaps it is our other-worldism that keeps getting in the way; too busy saving our souls to think why the people of my country die of the most ordinary conditions of flesh.So what is education? I only wish I knew the answer to this but I can have a try. Education is all that sets your mind and spirit free. If you are educated, then you have a sense of independence and you are brimming with qualified confidence. Education to me is the ability to combine mental fitness with physical and produce a human that is truly well rounded. Education provides you with the bread that feeds the hearth of your stomach but very importantly it provides you with the ideas to improve your life here and here-after. Education makes you think about others as much as you think about yourself. Anyone who says the only worthwhile education is to be had from books is only looking at a single colour of the rainbow. A grade from a school, college or university is not an education, it is just a grade. Education begins where your grade ends. I have a strong suspicion that education is meant to give you the power and skills to leave the world a slightly better place than you find it. This is why picking up a piece of litter from the street is indeed someone showing their education.Many years ago I watch a program on PTV about career counseling. In this program an unemployed graduate would be invited to the show and would be told what work options there may be for them. On one occasion a lady was being advised by the ‘expert’ who was taking her through all the options available and very soon it become apparent that this lady either did not want to or did not have the qualifications to do any of the jobs being suggested. Then in a moment of great triumph the expert said, ‘I have got it, I have got it; why don’t you become a teacher!’ I guess it must the easiest and the most undesirable job in the whole of Pakistan. If you cannot be anything worthwhile, you can always become a teacher. How do you educate a nation that attaches little or no value to the profession that is supposed to provide the next generation of skilled nation builders? The mushroom growth of private schools in Pakistan must mean that finally we have a system which values quality teaching and learning. If you believe this then you will have to believe that underpaid, poorly trained and overworked teachers in such schools will be motivated and driven enough to purvey a fine quality education.Educating Pakistan will only begin when we realize what the nature of the problem is. There is no business like education business because strictly speaking, it should be nearly impossible to make money out of a school that is properly delivering quality education. I think you will be hard-pressed to find a private school in Pakistan that is running on a loss. I am not against charging parents for educating their children but I am against the pretence of giving an education where all you are doing is training the children to regurgitate facts in exams. There are two things that I do not doubt at all; First, Pakistanis can produce a quality syllabus and second, we can produce good quality books to support it. This will need the expenditure of a lot more than 1 or 2 percent of our GDP on education as we can all guess. If you want quality, you will need to pay for it, there are no two ways about it. We will have to spend money on retraining our teachers so that they can differentiate between beating children and educating them. We will have to provide buildings and structures where the conditions are right for teaching and learning. We will have to stop all political interference in education and educational institutions. We will have to give our children a very good reason to be in school rather than wasting their time missing school. So what about those who cannot afford to go to school? These are the children that matter the most and if I had money to spend, I will spend it on these children. Educating Pakistan will mean that we do not use our children to provide slave labour to do the dirtiest and the most dangerous jobs in our society but to give the pen and paper and make them believe that the world is indeed their oyster.Educating Pakistan is not going to happen accidentally, we will all have to do our bit. Pakistan must depend on those who know what they are talking about to educate and inform our opinion about the value of the great equalizer; EDUCATION. I want my country to be a nation which does not treat education as an act of charity but as a basic human right of all its citizens.