PESHAWAR, April 22: Federal Minister for Education Zobaida Jalal said on Thursday that the curricula had been reviewed after a lapse of 16 years to improve the education system which needed to be reformed to be brought at par with the modern world.
She was speaking at a seminar at a hotel here on Thursday. She said the new curricula would address issues confronting the education system, adding the country had suffered immensely in terms of human resource development because of outdated education curricula and it had created a huge gulf between humanities and science subjects.
The education minister clarified that preparation of the curriculum was the sole responsibility of provincial governments and the federal government approved it only after taking suggestions and proposals from the federating units.
Ms Jalal said, for the first time, a national curricula was being prepared to ensure uniformity in the education system all over the country and the national curricula would be ready by year 2007.
She said the national curricula would separate history subject from geography, which had been merged in the current curricula under the Pakistan Study. "Under the national curricula, history and geography will be taught from Class 6th onward as separate subjects," she observed.
She said the provinces had the right to give recommendations for inclusion of important personalities in the national curricula. "What we want is that our emphasis should be on the promotion of positive aspects of role models instead of concentrating on their shortcomings," Ms Jalal observed.
About the role of textbooks boards, the federal minister said the federal cabinet in 2001 had decided to strengthened it further by deregulating the printing of textbooks to bring the monopoly of a few people to an end and to provide textbooks to the students at cheaper rates.
She said the government intended to bring the private sector forward in the printing of the books. She said the NWFP would be hosting the first national workshop on textbook boards and their working.
Giving a breakup of the Education For All (EFA) and Education Sector Reforms (ESR) programmes under the NEC formula, she said 80 per cent of funds were distributed on the basis of population whereas 10 per cent were allocated for Fata, Northern Areas, Islamabad and the remaining 10 per cent were equally divided between the NWFP and Balochistan provinces.
The federal minister said she would discuss the request of the NWFP government to the prime minister about the establishment of a Women University in Peshawar. She said the federal government would provide funds for the purpose besides extending full support and cooperation to help it materialize this goal.
Ms Jalal said her re-entry to politics after the October 2002 elections was aimed at ensuring continuity to education sector reforms which were not implemented in her earlier tenure because of lack of funding.
She deplored the tendency of scrapping all policies of previous regimes by newly-formed governments during the last 50 years, adding that that was why the present government had picked up the education policy of the Nawaz Sharif government and had started its implementation after minutely modifying it.
