CHARSADDA: A news item appeared in newspapers that the National Assembly had passed a bill on private educational institutions of Islamabad. The bill authorises the federal government to regulate these educational institutions through a regulatory body and aims to ensure that all of them follow the same fee structure, a uniform curricula, same duration of the academic session, same yearly holidays and so on and so forth.
The provincial governments are also requested to work in a similar manner by presenting similar bills in their respective provincial assemblies. Private educational institutions in the provinces charge exorbitant amounts from the poor parents according to their own sweet will and with little regulation. Their academic affairs need to be checked, too, from time to time by a regulatory body. Lavatories are unavailable in many schools and where they are available, they are unhygienic and unusable. Rote-learning is the order of the day and it seems that many schools are ‘de-educating’ instead of educating. All children are allotted high marks in their internal tests, giving a false impression to their parents that they are doing well in their classes.
Therefore, private schools need to be immediately regulated before the situation becomes any worse. I hope that the respective provincial assemblies, in the twilight of their five-year long tenure, will regularise private schools.
Mohammad Fayyaz
Published in The Express Tribune, January 31st, 2013.
