The Sindh government’s decision to make the learning of Chinese compulsory from 2013 should be taken seriously.
JUBAIL, SAUDI ARABIA: The Sindh government’s decision to make the learning of Chinese compulsory from 2013, for all class VI students, should be taken seriously, even by those who have now come out against it. Such decisions only serve to confirm our lack of vision in prioritising our needs. On the one hand, the schools run by the provincial government are, by and large, in a shambles, where even the teaching of English or Urdu leaves much to be desired. And on the other, we want to teach the students Chinese!
Apart from the deficiencies in teaching, many schools also lack proper buildings, have decaying or no furniture, non-existent laboratories, no playing field and much of the teaching staff shows up only to collect salaries. Whoever came up with the Chinese teaching idea clearly does not know that the young students of Sindh are already burdened with not one but three languages — namely Urdu, English and Sindhi. Besides, it is widely-believed that Chinese is a very difficult language to learn for a non-native speaker.
One can only hope that good sense will prevail and this decision will be reversed well before the 2013 school year.
Masood Khan
Published in The Express Tribune, September 9th, 2011.
