Recipe for frustration
one factor which has arguably gone amiss is the rapid population expansion and the government failing to catch up
Education is touted as one of the country’s greatest Achilles heels when it comes to progress. With over 22 million children out-of-school, poor literacy rates and a paucity of funds made worse by natural disasters and militancy. The government has ostensibly struggled to cope.
But one factor which has arguably gone amiss is the rapid population expansion and the government failing to catch up with the sluggish pace of expanding facilities.
In Swat, the home district of Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa (K-P) Chief Minister Mahmood Khan, children continue to be crammed into small classrooms or even have to make do with sitting on the ground in the courtyard or on the roof. Teachers have to jump from class to class, with each handling scores of children in each class. The story is not too different in the more urbanised centres such as Peshawar where as many as 70 children are packed into a single classroom of government-run schools.
The situation remains dire even after five years of education reforms – an admitted emergency priority for the past Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf (PTI) led government in the province which either built or expanded as many as 2,700 schools, while 57,000 new teachers were recruited. K-P’s education budget was also doubled between 2013 and 2018, which per its former provincial education minister “was the biggest increase in the history of this province.”
The PTI-led federal government is now looking to double the overall education budget of the country from 2.2 per cent of gross domestic product (GDP).
While needed, it is evident that the government cannot solve such a multi-pronged problem if it just treats the symptoms rather than the source of the problem: a population boom.
This is one fight the government will have to fight on all fronts simultaneously to prevail.
Published in The Express Tribune, December 17th, 2018.
But one factor which has arguably gone amiss is the rapid population expansion and the government failing to catch up with the sluggish pace of expanding facilities.
In Swat, the home district of Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa (K-P) Chief Minister Mahmood Khan, children continue to be crammed into small classrooms or even have to make do with sitting on the ground in the courtyard or on the roof. Teachers have to jump from class to class, with each handling scores of children in each class. The story is not too different in the more urbanised centres such as Peshawar where as many as 70 children are packed into a single classroom of government-run schools.
The situation remains dire even after five years of education reforms – an admitted emergency priority for the past Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf (PTI) led government in the province which either built or expanded as many as 2,700 schools, while 57,000 new teachers were recruited. K-P’s education budget was also doubled between 2013 and 2018, which per its former provincial education minister “was the biggest increase in the history of this province.”
The PTI-led federal government is now looking to double the overall education budget of the country from 2.2 per cent of gross domestic product (GDP).
While needed, it is evident that the government cannot solve such a multi-pronged problem if it just treats the symptoms rather than the source of the problem: a population boom.
This is one fight the government will have to fight on all fronts simultaneously to prevail.
Published in The Express Tribune, December 17th, 2018.