‘Bureaucrats should send their children to public schools’

Jalaluddin has been running a government school in Sector 11 for the last two years.

KARACHI:

Jalaluddin is a British educationist who has been running a school in Orangi for the last two years.

Many times, he has almost packed up his bags and prepared to get out of Karachi after seeing bloody bodies and listening to the guns roar outside, but he always ends up staying back.

“Someone needs to run these government schools. No one wants to go to public schools and I want to change that,” he said.

Jalal adopted the government-run Qasimul Uloom School in Orangi’s Sector 11 in 2010. When he took on the management of the school there were only 60 students but now the number is seven times of that. By April 420 students were enrolled.

Like any educationist, Jalal also wants his school to excel in academics and sports. His aspirations seem to be bearing fruit as the taekwondo team from his school clinched first prize in the Hamara Karachi Festival held in March.

But why come to Pakistan with 33 years of experience in primary-school teaching?  “If my wife was from Somalia I would have moved there,” Jalal joked, his grey eyes twinkling. His wife is from Karachi. Jalal was born in Birmingham but later moved to London. At 43 he embraced Islam and a little while later married a Pakistani woman.

“Once my wife’s uncle came to visit us and he talked in detail about Pakistan. It raised my interest,” he said. His first week-long visit to Karachi was in 2001. He saw the ‘appalling’ condition of government schools and he knew he had to play a part. So he took early retirement in 2003 and came to work in Karachi’s ghettos. In 2010, while campaigning for a hepatitis B vaccination programme with a British charity, he stumbled on the government school which he currently runs.

“The campus was empty and we came to know that school classes were being held in an empty madrassa nearby.”

Jalal sought help from the education department and convinced the students to shift back to the school from the madrassah. Gradually he started renovating the building and then formally adopted the school in 2011. There are now 19 teachers in the school and 16 out of them are paid by Jalal while the remaining are government teachers.

Besides funds, the biggest problem for Jalal is the language barrier since the school is Urdu-medium. “It’s frustrating for me that I can’t teach here,” he says. “I have picked up  words of Urdu but I can’t teach.” Another problem is violence which is relatively more frequent in Orangi than the rest of the city. “So far the school has managed to stay aloof from politics. I get frustrated when violence affects the children’s studies,” says Jalal. “A talented girl wanted to move away from this area after her father was stabbed.”

The solution to change how things are run in government schools, which Jalal calls ‘dreadful and appalling’, is that the people should come forward and own them. “I believe that every government employee should send their children to a public school. Only then will things change.”

Published in The Express Tribune, May 25^th, 2012.