November 9, 2005	Wednesday	Shawwal 6, 1426

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ISLAMABAD, Nov 8: A two-day conference on ‘education as the basis for freedom and democracy’ opened here on Tuesday with its organizers calling for reduction in the country’s military budget and spending more on education.

The speakers were of the view that the problems confronting the public education will remain as long as the literacy level is low, stressing on offering incentives to parents to send their children to school.

The dropout rate is one of the highest in South Asia and educational opportunities are limited, they said.

Pakistan can cut its military spending by half over the next 20 years, said Mr Peter-Andreas Bochmann, Resident Representative of the German political foundation Friedrich Naumann Stiftung (FNSt), the lead organizer.

“I don’t see any real enemies in the neighbourhood and (thus) the necessity to maintain a big army,” he said, adding “India could do the same”.

But the opening session was dominated by laments over the loss of thousands of schoolchildren in the Oct 8 earthquake and, as one organizer called it, “the government’s inability” to deal with the catastrophe.

“The earthquake highlighted an important lesson: the lesson of safety of educational institutions, as many educational building’s have destroyed and many students killed”, Mr Bochmann said.

“If the government had been prepared and acted quickly, many more children could have been saved than foreign rescue teams actually did,” said Anees Jillani of the Society for the Protection of the Rights of the Child (SPARC), one of the organizers of the conference.

Pakistan, he said, prides itself to be a nuclear power but ranks fifth among the countries with “worst education” in the world. Some 13 million children in the country — almost half of them girls — are not going to school at all.

“We spend less than two per cent of our GDP (gross domestic product) on education — that too not properly. What else you can expect when an army general heads the education ministry,” the SPARC official said.

His co-organizer, Asif Khan of the Liberal Forum Pakistan (LFP), however, hailed as “positive” the federal government’s recent decision to double the education budget.

Pakistan’s education system was split three ways and had been deteriorating since 1970s. “This system demands almost total overhaul,” he said.

Government should introduce liberal curricula as had existed until the 1960s, he said. He also recommended offering monetary incentives to parents to send their children to schools and tax cuts to private foundations to encourage them to open schools.

Mr Khan said by diverting funds to universities, the Higher Education Commission did “disservice to basic education”.

The conference is aimed to address host of issues related to the education system, assessing the current political situation with regard to education, teachers training, and examination system.

The experts pointed out that as the dropout rate is one of the highest in South Asia and educational opportunities are limited, the problems will continue to plague the public education system citing the ghost schools and teacher absenteeism issues.

Accentuating on the need of quality education, Director International Academy for leadership, Germany, Mr Jorg Dehnert spoke about his country’s education system and said that nevertheless Germany’s population and work force were highly educated but it needs considerable improvement as well.

In response to a question, Mr Dehnert said, “an estimated 5.2 per cent of Germans between the ages of 25 and 64 participate in training or upgrading courses at any one time, they prefer vocational trainings.”

First secretary of German embassy, Ms Ellen Goelz, said the present curriculum in public schools are not developing the element of free thinking in the minds of younger generation. “Such type of curriculum teaches a narrow approach of history, religion and social norms among the students”, she said stressing on overhauling it.

Those who presented their papers in the first session were Dr Naeem Mohsin from Sudhaar Network, Tariq Rehman from Quaid-i-Azam University, The Learning School’s principal, Ms Nadia Ahmed and Karachi Cambridge School’s principal, Ms Azra Aqeel.

The experts in the second session spoke on curricula, and presented a draft resolution on the issue, stressing the need for reflecting on the curricula and consider whether children in Pakistan are being encouraged to be ideologists or globalists.

These questions need to be deliberated upon keeping in mind the reality of Pakistan’s education system, where there might be a number of options (public, private, non-profit schools, madressahs) but perhaps limited choices.

Politicians, scholars, educationists, teachers, principals, parents, students, youths participated in the conference.

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