KARACHI - Deploring the current status of education and ineffective steps taken by authorities in Sindh to address the enormous task, the educationists and political workers on Sunday demanded the provincial government to declare “Education Emergency” for 10 years.
The event titled “Consultative Conference on Education” was organised by Awami Jamhori Party (AJP) at Karachi Press Club and was attended by the concerned citizens of Sindh belonging to academia, political workers and various other sections of society. During the conference, they demanded the government to create an education management service that should cater to the continuous training and career planning of the teaching staff.
A committee was also formed there comprising of educationists including former Vice Chancellor of the Sindh University Jamshoro Mazharul Haq Siddiqui, IBA Sukkur’s Director Nisar Ahmed Siddiqui, Gul Muhammad Rind, former bureaucrat Mir Muhammad Parhiar, Professor Lutufallah Mangi, Ghazala Rehman, Shireen Mustafa Narejo and others, which will chalk out a long term strategy to carry on Educational Movement and to presents reports on state of education at gross root level with measures to improve it.
AJP chief Karam Hussain Wassan, who presided over the conference, said that his party had been raising the issue of education in Sindh as it took out 35-Day long march in last April from Larkana and Sukkur to Karachi and submitted a five point agenda.
“Hosting a conference on the education was aimed to recap our ongoing struggle and formulate a concerted agenda to be pursued”, he said, declaring that the provincial government badly failed to provide quality education to our children, so it was high time that political forces, members of civil society and academia took a lead and owned the issue with consistency.
He said that feudal lords and PPP government were responsible for deterioration of the education as they wiped out the funds for education in the province.
The AJP chief further said that more than five million children especially girls of school-going age currently were out of school in Sindh.
Sindh University former VC Mazharul Haq Siddiqui, Abrar Kazi, Amanullah Shaikh, Mir Parhiar, Saeeda Gopang, Hareef Chandio, Mukhtiar Abbasi and others also spoke on the occasion.
Later, a declaration was adopted by the conference, which demanded of the Sindh chief minister to hold a press conference along with his cabinet and declare “Education Emergency” for 10 years, seeking the help and involvement of all the people of Sindh in shouldering this monumental problem. During the period of emergency, all political parties' involvement in the higher institutions of learning and in colleges should be strictly banned and the teachers unions' from primary to university level, be restrained from disrupting academic activity, it was committed.
The conference further demanded the government to declare one girls and one boys high school in each Tehsil headquarters as Model Schools, assigning best teachers and providing library, laboratory and other facilities, along with initiation of pick up and drop of children from adjoining villages/localities.
“Revise and update curriculum that helps create thinking minds, as against those used to rote learning, and that promotes liberal and progressive thought in our youngsters, as against parochialism and narrow mindedness/intolerance rampant in our society”, the conference declaration demanded, adding, “create an education management service that should cater to the continuous training and career planning of the teaching staff, from the kinder garden to the university level, and that should reward the better teacher and administrators”.
The conference also emphasised on creating an effective monitoring system of all schools by periodically publishing names of all schools and the staff debuted there in along with the addresses and cell numbers.