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Old Sunday, December 05, 2010
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Default Sunday, 5th Dec, 2010

Which education

system suits us best?


Students and parents keep looking for an education system that best serves the purpose

By Hamaad Mustafa

The United Kingdom has recently revamped its entire education system. With re-doubled stress on languages and communication skills they are trying to emphasise the age-old point about education not being about the destination but the journey. Systems have already replaced the A levels in many of the leading schools in Britain, such as Charterhouse and Westminster. Of course, we Pakistanis still lag behind, and as each year passes, the number of pounds we pay foreign bodies such as the CIE only increase.

The problems with the education system in Pakistan can be divided into two main categories. Firstly, the structural problems in the system would require the entire set up to be overhauled. Secondly, there are procedural issues which have come about due to the sheer lack of regulation in both our public and private educational systems.

First come the problems with the structure of our educational system. One of the guiding principals of any educational system is equal opportunities for all. In fact, one purpose of education is to counter act the inequalities prevalent in society. The system in Pakistan is strictly divided into the haves and have nots.

The gap between the public and private systems is great in many countries all around the world. But in Pakistan, the discrimination is more institutionalised, it is in fact a part of policy. We have the local matriculation system and the British GCSE O/A level system running side by side.

The British system clearly provides a better standard of education, a fact that universities seem to have caught up on. A student from the inter system, no matter how bright, will never be on a level-playing field when competing with the GCSE students. Apart from a few half-hearted efforts by our medical colleges, little seems to have been done to correct this.

As it stands, our government has little incentive to remove this disparity. As long as their own children and the children of the influential educated upper middle class have access to quality education, little heed will be paid to the children in the matriculation system.

If anything, the direction the government is heading towards is providing greater incentives to students studying in foreign systems. Until and unless our policy-makers’ own children have to go through the same system as the masses, they will have little incentive to try and improve it. The best and only way to give our law-makers a stake in the system is to make it compulsory for all students across the board.

India started off in a predicament very similar to ours. They chose to focus on their own domestic system of education. Even though initially it was not internationally recognised, after a few years it became so. Now universities across the world recognise and widely accept Indian students. In fact, Pakistanis doing the GCSE have little edge over regular Indians when it comes to university placements.

The problems with education in Pakistan don’t just end there; we have issues which make even our high end GCSE set-up an embarrassment for any god-fearing educationalist. As mentioned before, education should be about the journey, but such is not the case in Pakistan. We have effectively killed any seed of creativity our young ones may have possessed by deliberately boxing education into 3-month crash courses. But it’s not all bad, these courses come with a guaranteed A grade, or at least the more expensive ones do. Thus, another more way in which parents can buy their children’s future.

Naturally, these crash courses hardly inculcate in one things like ettiquettes and grooming which are supposed to be as integral a part of education as learning. Their focus is entirely on the exam at the end of the three months, and they will stuff you with information they know you will forget as soon as the exam ends just so you can get that grade you were aiming for.

Retaining information or getting more out of the school experience than just one’s CIE certificate, these are things one can’t gloat about or which don’t make a student look smarter in drawing room discussions. In a society as materialistic as ours, where one reason kids are so pressurised is this social pressure parents themselves feel, it is not a surprise that we have so conveniently turned education into a tool to promote conformity and social inequality.
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