WE need to adopt home-schooling to safeguard them and indeed all children who are vulnerable to terrorism, epidemic, war and other perils that are beyond their control.

The home-schooling is popular in the West. In the US alone, nearly 1.5 million children are home-schooled and showing better results than children schooled outside their homes.

Home-schooling can be done through the Internet. If the Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa government initiates home-schooling during the war-related emergency, then the government can create systems of education that utilise the Internet, TV, FM radio and 3G and 4G mobile technologies.

This would take more than half the burden off of the parents as they can sit with the child and make use of the lessons on the aforesaid facilities. Online teachers are never absent, they are not abusive, cannot hit children, and their being bad at teaching is out of the question because they are being watched all the time.

If our wars are going to be unconventional, our safety requirements, too, should be accordingly managed. Children are the most vulnerable and the precious part of population. Education is the most important component of their development.

The pursuit of education needs not endanger children’s lives. Modern technologies have introduced new and innovative ways of teaching children to read and write.

Cellphones are as good as a classroom in a building – only safer during dangerous times. Through classrooms carried to children’s homes in the shape of cellphones that play educative videos, virtual teachers running online schools on computer screens, and TV screens streaming educative lessons financed by the government, children can educate themselves in the safety of their homes, instead of assembling in buildings, which can get bombed or shelled during war.

The government is requested to consider enforcing emergency for as long as the country is at war and design safe systems for education of children of armed forces personnel and IDPs, and children anywhere in Pakistan who are at risk owing to one reason or another.

The government will be pleasantly surprised with the result of its innovative and caring initiative.

Hafiz Sohail Yaseen
Lahore

Published in Dawn, February 6th, 2015

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