KARACHI: Former senator and federal minister Javed Jabbar said on Sunday that it is high time that the education departments of provincial governments link up with academic reform initiatives with the private sector so that their impact could be multiplied and expanded to cover large sections of teachers and students associated with the government-run school systems.
He was delivering the keynote address at the opening ceremony of the two-day “Badal Do Teachers’ Expo” at a local hotel. He recommended that Sindh Education Foundation being part of provincial government’s educational set-up should also become part of initiatives like “Badal Do” where a number of private sector’s like-minded organizations can get together to inculcate values of tolerance, cultural diversity, pluralism and civic responsibility among teachers
He urged the federal and provincial governments to link-up three parallel education systems that continue to produce three different sets of educated Pakistanis including matriculation, Cambridge and Madressah systems.
“There should be an attempt to introduce a broadly singular education system in the country in place of these three lethal divisions in the society,” he said.
He informed that recently the world-renowned UK-based magazine the Economist had recognized and appreciated educational reforms being observed to improve government-run schooling in the country especially in the provinces of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa and Punjab.
Such an appreciation by a well-reputed international magazine showed the progressive nature of Pakistani education system where reforms could bring massive improvement in favour of both students and teachers, he said.
Higher Education former chairperson Shahnaz Wazir Ali said that schoolteachers should focus on their own cultural diversity and pluralistic nature of Pakistani society and the related values of tolerance and peaceful co-existence among different sections of the population as the same set of values should be taught to the students. She said that there is a need to bring reforms and improvement in school curriculum to help inculcate such ideas.
Senior journalist Zubeida Mustafa inaugurated exhibition of photographs taken by the trainee teachers of the Badal Do programme, reflecting on their perception of diversity and plurality in the city of Karachi, where the programme has been piloted
In the next phase, the” Badal Do” initiative plans to go for a broader community outreach by engaging with more schools, management teachers and students as well as parents, guardians and other community members through the involvement of 5,000 teachers in 300 schools of the city.