Illiterate students portray dismissal picture of our education system

Illiterate students portray dismissal picture of our education system

Everyone acknowledges that our educational situation is a miserable one, particularly the public sector institutions, with official figures still putting the overall literacy rate at under 60 per cent in the country.

Unfortunately, this is radically lower in some parts of the country, with vast regional differences pioneering their own set of issues.

A fresh survey states that even children who do go to school, in a significant number of cases, remain unable to read or perform basic mathematical works. Simply they are emerging illiterate from uneducated the institutions they go to.

A survey-based Annual Status of Education Report 2011, prepared by the South Asia Forum for Education Development, ascertained that our education system stood at a critical stage.

It found that on only 41.8 per cent of children between the ages of 5-16 can read a sentence in Urdu or their regional languages. Furthermore, merely 25.8 per cent of those assessed children are able to read a sentence in English, which reveals the entire story.

The situation at ground is messier what we are thinking, as even at class five levels, 52.6 per cent of children fail to read class two level stories in Urdu or their mother tongues. It is vital to note here that a total of 146,874 children in 2,502 villages and 97 urban blocks were covered by the survey.

The children calculation was even more terrible as 40.1 per cent children could solve two-digit totaling sums, while only 23.6 per cent children could do three-digit separation arithmetic.

Despite the fact Prime Minister Syed Yousaf Raza Gilani declared 2011 as the year of education in Pakistan, nothing noteworthy happened in the education part.

Shocking as the findings are, they do not come across as a major disclosure. ‘Literacy’ has long been evaluated by the aptitude to write ones name — a largely worthless exercise.

At the same time,  volunteers who work at government schools report an alarming number of children who basically cannot read even after five years or more of schooling.

Additionally, the finding identifies teacher malingering as a major problem, it is also true that teaching methods are reasons behind this.

The trend of rote-learning means that there is no clutch of the actual means to read, while syllabus devise at the primary level is so outdated that children have problems moving from one stage of reading to the other.

The situation is being further deteriorated due to inadequate teacher training and poor motivation. The need of the hour is to address the problem at the earliest without attempting to turn away from it.

Short URL: https://www.newspakistan.pk/?p=10890

Posted by Faisal Farooq on Jan 28 2012. Filed under Education, National, Opinion, Pakistan, Society. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.