Actions, not words

Khyber Pukhtunkhwa Minister for Elementary and Secondary Education Akbar Ayub Khan, while addressing a function at Islamia Collegiate School, said that PTI government has focused its attention on the provision of quality education to the youth. There is no denial of the fact that previous PTI provincial government has brought some improvement in school education by modest curriculum reforms and recruitment of highly qualified and dedicated teachers strictly on merit, a policy which was non-existent in the governments of other political parties. But the process of reforms in school education must go on by updating the curricula by hiring the services of capable and hardworking authors and reviews of text books.

The practice of copy and paste material must stop now. For example in the English Textbook Reader-1 items of traditional grammar has been mixed up with concepts of linguistics such as ‘Rebus’ and ‘Diagraph’. Students of primary classes need to be taught parts of speech, their usage, simple sentences, and other grammatical items to build their writing skills.

In the same function Vice Chancellor Islamia College University Dr. Naushad Khan highlighted the importance of higher education, which is the core of knowledge economy. Unfortunately, higher education was devolved to provinces as political gimmick under 18th Amendment and now both federal and provincial governments have abandoned their constitutional responsibility of providing it to talented young students at affordable cost. The financial crisis of public sector universities and unaffordable fee structures amply explains the lack of political and moral will to promote knowledge economy notwithstanding claims about it.