LAHORE: On the International Day of Education, the civil society stakeholders in education reforms showed concerns about the recent measures introduced in school education in Punjab, terming it loaded with religious content and nomenclature, changing the very character of school education in the province.

The Centre for Social Justice (CSJ) and Working Group for Inclusive Education (WGIE) released an update on Monday about the education policy confusions in the province.

According to the stakeholders, instead of modernising education and introducing creative and inquisitive learning, the government had relied on religion-centric reforms. The steps made public education next to seminary education, which would be a colossal loss to an already challenged education sector. They said most of schoolchildren were suffering learning losses due to Covid-intermittent school closures, poor education content and teaching methodologies, leading to low learning outcomes and enrolment losses according to the Annual Status of Education Report (ASER) 2021.

They regretted the government had bent upon imposing extreme religiosity upon the students and termed several interventions made in the recent past as regressive.

In June 2020, the Punjab Assembly amended the Punjab Curriculum and Textbook Board (PCTB) Act, 2015 adding a sub-section 2(a) to Section 10 (Prohibition), to vet all manuscripts through the Muttahida Ulema Board Punjab assigned to review and approve the textbooks before their publication. This has ignited controversies regarding pictures of Isaac Newton and Malala Yousafzai in the textbooks printed by various publishers. However, no other province has constituted an Ulema Board to review the textbooks.

They said the government was making inconsistent policy interventions according to its own understanding and there was a risk that the minority of students would be discriminated against and face huge psychological pressures.

The PCTB Act 2015, amended in 2020, has added confusion to the policy of ‘single curriculum’ to the extent that it is defying the concept and objectives of ‘public education’” as well as ‘religious education’.

Published in Dawn, January 25th, 2022