Amid this pandemic, reopening educational institutions is expensive and challenging
KARACHI: Amid this pandemic, reopening educational institutions is expensive and challenging. This is because such a move carries an overwhelming public health risk, and parents and teachers are reasonably cautious in this regard. However, reopening them is an inevitable decision because it is impossible to compensate for the loss of education for around 50 million students across the country. Already 75 million children are deprived of their constitutional rights and to our dismay, more than 50% of them are girls.
In order to resume the educational activities in Pakistan, the HEC must work in collaboration with the health department to come up with a way whereby educational institutions can reopen while maintaining the necessary precautions. This means that students will also require social-economic support apart from PPEs. There is no doubt that online education has remained a challenge for Pakistan in multiple contexts. Majority of the students do not have internet facilities and many claim that this virtual medium is a condensed version of physical and face-to-face interaction which makes it less effective. However, what is worrying is the fact that parents have culminated the fear that even if the schools hastily open, there will be little or no necessary precautions to safeguard the children, and the community at large, from infection. Many Parents claim that they are happy with home schooling instead of sending the children to school this fall.
Thus, with enormous education losses at the backdrop, the re-opening of educational institutions requires pertinent compliance with WFP, Unesco and Unicef guidelines. With the banner of “protecting and advancing the right of every learner”, the resuming of educational activities must follow policy reform, protection and wellness. The educational board should extend a helping hand to the most marginalised segment in these testing times.
Hadia Mukhtar
Published in The Express Tribune, June 26th, 2020.
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