News Feature: Student Community
When it comes to a third world country like ours, problems pertaining to students are more often than not either overlooked entirely or set on the back burner to deal with later with the intention of catering to the mountain of political and social problems first, even though aforementioned problems don’t get solved as well but that is a different debate altogether. In a country where students are kept ignorant on purpose, are encouraged to avoid critical thinking and motivated towards rot learning all of their poorly made curriculum, pupils are bound to face uncountable problems in their day to day student life.
For instance, students in Pakistan have to face several issues in regards to their educational requirements such as directionless education system, unqualified teaching staff, inadequate curricula, financial issues, harassment issues, less budget and sudden fee hikes. These problems have been discounted for so long that eventually, people have now stopped fighting against them since we are not able to see any apparent change in the past two decades. The cycle of poor education, unaffordable fee structure, lack of critical thinking and one-dimensional mindset keeps repeating in order to benefit those in power. Moreover, when the education system itself is at the edge of its devastation, how can we expect to find decent teachers for teaching? The teachers themselves are a product of this deplorable education system worth mere pennies whereas the Government refuses to do its job.
Apart from Government and the Establishment negating everything related to better education system and opportunities for students, our educational institutes as well strive to make every student’s life as miserable as possible with sudden fee hikes every few months and unnecessary fines on the most irrelevant of issues such as dress code, listening to loud music and whatnot. On public outrage over enforcing a fine on students over listening to music loudly, Gomal University’s Vice-Chancellor Professor Dr Iftikhar Ahmed, while confirming the incident, said that “music that disturbs the educational environment” is banned in the university. And the alarming bit is that this is not an isolated event, these kinds of fines are imposed on the students every day without being granted any window for negotiation. These fines break the spines of already financially struggling students and make them stray further away from this crumpling education system.
In addition to this, our beloved institutes refuse to fire teachers involved in harassment, instead they choose to silence the victims in order to save their measly reputation and back up the culprit. Due to this, the harassment cases in educational institutes are increasing by the minute as the offenders find reassurance in institute’s lack of appropriate action.
But in the past couple of years, we have been able to see a slight silver lining. Students in Pakistan have come out and raised their voices against the injustice they face at the hand of the government as well as their educational institutes such as student solidarity march which is held every year or students belonging to Islamia College University Peshawar marching against sexual harassment by teachers.
Albeit these marches and protests have not been able to bring a major alteration concerning the problems Pakistani students face, however this seems to light a little bit of hope that this pitiable education system has still failed to diminish the will of many students. These students have shown courage in challenging the existing system of educational and student oppression, they display enthusiasm in building a better and brighter future for themselves and the future generation which had remained bleak for such an extensive period of time.
To conclude, students of this country for the longest time have been dealing with pathetic and enraging problems at the hands of not only our Government but also the educational institutes. It’s about time that we change this unfair and intolerable mistreatment and join hands to raise our voices against it as one man can bring change in his surroundings but a few can bring a revolution.
-Author,
Maida Abbas