Raising Educational Standards

Raising Educational Standards

Muhammad Arif Tangi

ariftangi@gmail.com

http://www.thefrontierpost.com/article/203738/

 

Education sector has remained the victim of experimentations for the last many years. These experimentations have both positive and negative values. In the recent past efforts have been made on many levels to bring both quantitative and qualitative improvements and high claims are being made  for addressing relevant legislations, ensuring quality control, improving evaluation system, involving the community  and increasing access to education. Without criticizing these efforts merely for identifying the negative values, an attempt for further improvement is sought in the following lines.

On legislation side, the 18^th Constitutional Amendment is a milestone for raising educational standards in Pakistan. Under the amendment the concurrent list has been abolished and education has been devolved to the provinces. The spirit of this amendment is decentralization which aims at expediting decision making by empowering the provincial authorities and reaching to the grassroots level. This development is a positive value which is at par with the global trends in education for increased decentralization in governance and administration. As we are in the transitional period it will take time to fully comprehend and implement further decentralization by empowering local administration and community through democratic participation. On immediate level we need to hold local bodies’ elections and work for public-private partnership in education so that the process takes a logical path.

Three legislations which could bring long-term impacts are: Right to Free and Compulsory Education, Prohibition of Corporal Punishment and The Protection against Harassment of Women at Workplace. These laws, if implemented in letter and spirit, will greatly contribute towards high educational standards in the country.

Another significant milestone for reforms in education sector was the realization of the value of research also called knowledge-based economy. The establishment of Higher Education Commission (HEC) by the previous government and the subsequent PhD scholarships both indigenous and abroad coupled with the establishment of National Testing Service (NTS) and NTS tests for qualifying to Masters, Mphil and PhD courses speak volumes of the successes of HEC. Increased pay structures for university teachers and raising the requisite qualification for faculty members is another success story. The present government further raised the higher education standard by establishing more quality universities. The establishment of nine universities only in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa is one example how higher education has been promoted with the requisite global standards.

Primary and secondary schools and degrees colleges which were previously neglected were also enthusiastically pursued by the present government. Raising the pay structure and up-gradation of teachers at both the federal and provincial levels is a good experiment which deserves our appreciation. The introduction of mother tongue as medium of instruction for the primary schools, English-medium for science subjects and increased in technical, vocational and  computer education are all positive values of the current education system. However as compared to universities, our schools and colleges are still lacking basic infrastructure, quality pedagogy and an overall conducive environment for child-friendly schooling. These schools and colleges require massive budgets to cope with some of the private schools and colleges which are at present ensuring better quality and results.

An important negative value of the present education system is the administrative failures in planning, execution, monitoring and evaluation. No Standard Operational Procedures (SOPs) exist for ensuring merit, facilitating students and parents, devising an accountability system for teachers or heads of the institutions and increasing the involvement of bureaucracy at the grassroots level. This is a structural problem which is the result of poor governance. Realizing the need to take education as “investment” for future, the government must deal it separately from the existing bureaucratic mechanism which is characterized by top-down decision making, red-tapism, power hierarchy with the so-called “through proper channel” mechanism and at times corrupt administration.

Another negative value of the present education system is the absence of proper evaluation system. By system I mean the existing governmental structures and operational procedures. Leaving aside universities and other autonomous bodies which imparts education, the evaluation of educational standards is solely restricted to boards of intermediate and secondary education or these boards perform very limited functions. While there is need for evaluation at all level, the existing functions of these boards might be extended to cover all aspects of curriculum such as research on changing educational needs or improvement in the existing system, devising syllabus and publishing textbooks, conducting teachers training programs, organizing and managing co-curricular activities and  ensuring a multi-tiers evaluation system which is not solely restricted to conducting annual examination but which is broader in scope and which can grade students, teachers and educational institutions (including government schools and colleges, private institutions and Madaris) on a broad-based criteria of performances in different areas such as curricular and co-curricular activities, greater community participation and exceptional performances in different educational fields. Boards on similar pattern may also be established at district level for primary education and the existing technical and vocational education boards may be assigned such extended functions.

The efforts for community involvement through democratic participation have also failed to deliver the expected results. The idea to involve the community in school management through Parents-Teachers Association is excellent. However, nobody bothers how these associations are elected and how much powers are they given in the schools management. There is no monitoring system in place and it is left to the whim of the schools’ heads to nominate community elders in the so-called parents’ elections which are mostly not held as per requirements and if held are  voted by a few parents who are close to the schools heads.

In order to raise the overall educational standards more efforts are needed. The so-called ambiguous ideological narratives must be replaced with more pragmatic values in education. Our curriculum needs an overhauling so that it becomes relevant to our existing problems, having more practical utility in our day to day life and which can foster creativity, research and economic well-being of the population. Poor governance should be addressed as major hurdle and modern E-governance should be introduced at all level to ensure transparency and accountability. An inter-sectoral approach towards education is the cry of the day which will help us addressing legislative, administrative, qualitative and quantitative problems by adopting multiple but integrated strategies for long-term impacts.