THE Punjab government in its wisdom is persisting with its policies of setting up more Daanish schools and distributing laptops among talented students. It has allocated Rs2 billion for four Daanish schools (each school having separate section for boys and girls) in four districts and Rs4 billion for the provision of laptops to another 125,000 brilliant students studying at BS (Honours) and postgraduate level in colleges and universities.

However, in stark comparison, the government has allocated a meagre Rs700 million (a major portion of this allocation has been reflected as a block allocation) for the whole of the Punjab Literacy and Non-Formal Basic Education Department (L&NFBE) in the budget presented for 2012-13. The department had demanded Rs1.437 billion for its Annual Development Programme.

During the current fiscal, the literacy department brought 120,000 out-of-school children in its fold and after developing their literacy skills 90,000 children were admitted to mainstream schools, including 65,000 children in public schools within the radius of one kilometre. This project was run in 10 union councils of each district in the province.

Of about 18,000 literacy schools’ students, who had appeared for their Punjab Examination Commission Class-V examination, 13,000 students earned the pass certificates.Without considering the fate of 6.5 million out-of-school children in Punjab, educationists are surprised at the ratio of allocation for Daanish schools and literacy department that could cater to a few hundred children and hundreds of thousands of children, respectively.

Stating that the government had stressed the need for achieving Millennium Development Goals, they said, the target could not be achieved through formal education system. Non-formal basic education system needed to be given an unprecedented boost, they said.

Regretfully, they said, this had not happened in the budget for the next fiscal year.

With a meagre allocation, a decade-old literacy department would launch a new four-year Punjab Accelerated Literacy Promotion Project (PALPP) outlaying a total cost of Rs5.920 billion aimed at imparting literacy to 953,830 children at merely Rs130 per child cost.

L&NFBE Secretary Dr Pervaiz Ahmad Khan had developed the PALPP after holding over 100 meetings with stakeholders and severally tried to give a presentation of the project to Chief Minister Shahbaz Sharif but he remained unlucky. The chief minister could not find time for the cause of out-of-school children.

The PALPP has six components and their beneficiaries (learners) in the parenthesis are – Non-Formal Basic Education (262,500), community learning centres (648,000), functional literacy centres (27,720), Prison (13,500), Eunuchs (360) and Brick Kiln (1,750).

Two major initiatives of the PALPP envisage setting up of 7,000 one-room one-teacher CLC in low-literacy 30 union councils in each district and setting up of functional literacy centres – a conversion of adult literacy centres.The literacy centres will cater to out-of-school, never to school and dropped out – and most of them doing child labour in one way or the other. They will be provided a Literacy Kit comprising books, stationery, blackboard, slates, charts and mat in each school.

At FLCs, the adults will be imparted literacy along with various skills finalised with the consultation of Tevta, PVTC and livestock departments.

In order to monitor the working of each literacy centre in the province, the literacy department has tagged all departments using GIS and run time monitoring is being piloted using android phones. “There will be no chance for functioning of a ‘ghost school’,” a literacy department official said.

Literacy department officials say the responsibility of imparting education to children after the passage of 18th Amendment has been shifted to the province. While, formal system of education cannot provide 100 per cent coverage and drop-out is a natural phenomenon all over the world, the need for non-formal education is inevitable. However, poor allocations had remained the biggest problem with the literacy department.

The officials also say the literacy department was implementing its initiatives on a project mode, while there was a dire need to institutionalise non-formal education interventions on regular mode through establishment of the Directorate of Literacy and Non-Formal Basic Education and sanctions of posts for NFBE schoolteachers in districts.

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PAKISTAN has recently witnessed an escalating rate of suicide among students of various levels. Strangely enough, the government in general and the educational leadership in particular have not been able to think and analyse the causes, let alone adopting the remedial measures.

In an analysis, Prof Dr Hafiz Muhammad Iqbal, currently the Dean Faculty of Education, who also specialises in cognitive/educational psychology, said increasing rate of suicide among students was because of examination stress, parental pressure and aspirations, curriculum that was beyond the cognitive reach of the children and a lack of teachers competence to implement effective teaching, harsh attitude of the teachers.

He said the curriculum of various levels recently implemented in Pakistan was intellectually demanding, for which most students did not have the ability to comprehend.

This was coupled with parental demands for students to get highest marks to seek admission to medical and engineering institutions. Students have constantly been put under pressure and they feel frustrated, perturbed and thwarted when they realise that they could not show highest in terminal public examinations, which were geared toward assessing rote-learning by students.

He said the fact of the matter was that even teachers lacked competence in the subject-matter content and pedagogical skills to implement effective teaching and conducive environment for students to learn effectively and comprehend the curricular material.

He said the circumstances become more adverse and frustrating when both parents as well teachers verbally abuse and ridicule and reprimand and physically abuse and punish the children.

Prof Iqbal said the recent incidence of students’ suicide put a compelling demand to introduce a comprehensive reforms in the system of education, including review and revision of curriculum in terms of its cognitive demand, complete revamping and re-engineering of teacher education in the country aimed at enhancing subject matter competence and pedagogical skills to implement teaching in accordance with students psychological level and need. – mansoormalik173@hotmail.com