Pakistan Muslim League-Nawaz Deputy Chairman Ahsan Iqbal has said that until and unless patterns of allocation for education are not changed, no number of speeches on strategic moves and shifts can deliver. He said the ruling elite was insensitive to the importance of education and was making gross under investment for education.
Iqbal was addressing the concluding session of a two-day international conference on “Quality – Inequality Quandary – Transacting Learning Relevance & Teacher Education in South Asia” organised by the South Asia Forum for Education Development (SAFED) and Idara-e-Taleem-o-Aagahi (ITA) in collaboration with Education Testing Service (ETS), Princeton, UK aid, and Foundation Open Society Institute at a local hotel on Thursday. He said the PML-N government in Punjab had made interventions in education sector but still lot more was decided.
He said the education system in vogue was discouraging questioning and resultantly blocking creativity and innovations in the society. Saying that there was a bias against questioning in the society, he said, questioning was considered disrespectful whether at homes, or workplaces or classrooms. Referring to the overdose of technology, he said technologies were weakening societal bonds and resulting in identity crisis. He stressed the need for changing the mindsets.
Iqbal said the present education system was not training students towards self-assessment but was based external evaluation that required rote learning. He called for standardising education delivery in classrooms citing an example of burger selling chains, who could sell standard burgers across Asia and Europe. He said there should be standardised delivery of education in terms of outcomes. He said that all children in the country should be given level playing field in terms of provision of educational facilities for upward social mobility. He said the children of lower strata were the real movers and shakers and they could provide social mobility ladders to a society that might lead towards break-through ideas.
Quaid-e-Azam University’s Dr Pervez Hoodbhoy said the knowledge was changing every passing year and decade and textbooks were also being replaced but the system of rote learning. He said language should not be a barrier for learning in a classroom. He said teacher should be able to communicate with his students well. “I teach Physics to my students at Quaid-e-Azam University in Urdu and at LUMS in English,” he added.
He said the problems lay with the textbooks because they were not teaching right things to students and were instead creating disaffection for the subjects. He suggested the textbooks should be thrown in River Ravi and new quality textbooks be acquired and translated to impart quality education that was committed to learning outcomes.
Hoodbhoy said the prevailing examination system was rotten. He said the present examination system was promoting rote learning and cheating. “Education is not about teaching but learning and internalisation,” he added. He stressed that there was a need to change the mindset of people to make modern technology gadgets useful.
Dr Iffat Shah, Ali Moeen Nawazish, Kasim Kasuri, Abbas Rasheed, Dr Noreen Khalid, Dr A.H. Nayyar, Zubeida Mustafa, Salaeya Butt, Arif Naveed, Nargis Sultana, Yamini Ayiar and Baela Raza Jamil also spoke on the occasion.
