#pakistani schools

[thinkchalk]

Your Teenager's Best Counsellor Sits One Row Behind Them

Pakistani schools are full of young people who already know how to show up for each other. We just haven’t trained them yet. I was observing a mentee’s class last term, one of those routine observation visits where you sit quietly at the back with a notepad and try not to distract anyone. The lesson was moving along well enough. But what caught my attention had nothing to do with the…

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[ksa73pk]

Pakistani Schools in Madina | مدینہ میں پاکستانی اسکول | Road Trip Vlog ...

[newstfionline]

In Pakistan’s war over books, even Helen Keller is not safe

By Tim Craig and Haq Nawaz Khan, Washington Post, February 14, 2015

PESHAWAR, Pakistan--A decade ago, former Pakistani military ruler Pervez Musharraf called for a new era of “enlightened moderation” in the country’s public schools.

But just two years after more secular textbooks arrived here in northwestern Pakistan, politicians and religious scholars are rolling back some reforms by limiting students’ exposure to Western theories, academics, scientists and authors--including Helen Keller.

The effort is being led by the conservative Jamaat-e-Islami party, which recently gained more power in a region on the front lines of Pakistan’s effort to curb Islamist extremism and terrorism. Now a party that wants Sharia law in Pakistan again has considerable influence over what 4 million students learn in 28,000 public schools in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province.

After Jamaat-e-Islami leaders scrutinized hundreds of pages of textbooks, a story about Keller, a deaf and blind American author and activist, is being removed from ninth-grade lesson plans. First- and second- grade books will no longer include photos of a Christmas tree and holiday cards, even though a small Christian community lives here. And inscriptions on textbooks stating “We want peace” are being replaced with religious verses, said a local education official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to freely discuss the matter.

“Pakistan is an Islamic country and nothing should be taught in our schoolbooks that [is] un-Islamic and against the ideology of Pakistan,” said Zahir Shah, a professor at Islamia University in Peshawar who is leading a review of textbooks for Jamaat-e-Islami.

Although it appears that other provincial leaders could still try to block some of the proposals, the debate shows how hard it will be to reform Pakistani school systems that have been shaped by the tide of Islamic fundamentalism that swept the country in the 1970s and 1980s.

Jamaat-e-Islami has recommended more than a dozen textbook changes, including banning images showing women in skirts, jeans and T-shirts. Party members also want to remove Darwin’s theory of evolution from science books so it doesn’t compete with Islamic teachings on creationism.

[hopingpakistan]

Army Public School Peshawar reopened today, after the Peshawar Incident. Photo credit: REUTERS

[newstfionline]

Pakistan’s Ghost Schools, Rusting Symbols Of A Nation’s Lost Potential

Naeem Sahoutara and Shadi Khan Saif, Portalkbr, Oct. 31, 2013

KARACHI--It’s 8 in the morning on a normal day at a local school in the Ghagar region on the outkirts of Karachi, Pakistan. But, there are no students here--and no teachers.

Village resident Muhammad Azeem Marri, 40, lives just next to the school, but his three school-age children are missing out on an education. “The school building has been there for the last 14 years,” he says. “But the teachers never come. There are no classes. The teachers are being paid, but the students are not getting taught.”

According to official figures released last year, there are about 25,000 so-called “ghost teachers” in Pakistan. And the majority of them are in Sindh province.

Half a kilometer away, there’s another government school. It’s dirty, with broken chairs and no benches for the children.

In fact, it is just one of 35 non-operating schools in this locality alone, which is home to 60,000 people.

Iqbal Gabol also lives close to the school, and his three children would begin going to school in the coming years were it open. “Not a single teacher has been appointed here since the school was built in 2005,” he says. “There’s no electricity. The building is of no use. We’ve requested many times to the chief minister, the education minister, even the president to make it functional, but nothing has happened.”

There are hundreds of thousands of government-established schools all over the country that are not functioning, either because of widespread corruption or the lack of an effective monitoring system.

Little 8-year-old Maria Ali from this village had to stop her studies in grade three. “I want to become a teacher so I can teach others,” she says. “But I can’t go to school because we don’t have one here. The teachers at the school where I used to go got fired, and no new teachers were appointed.”

Earlier this year the Pakistan Supreme Court ordered a countrywide inspection of the government-run schools to find out how many are running.

Here in the southern Sindh Province, the inspection found that about 20 percent of the government schools for both girls and boys are either non-functional or do not exist at all.

On a scorching hot morning at the only girls school in Ghagar, the students are studying outside. “We only have four classrooms for the 450 students,” says school headmistress Mithal Sayal. “There are up to 100 students in one room. There is only one toilet, and both water tanks are out of order. The student and teachers bring water from their homes.”

In 2010, the Pakistani government made a constitutional amendment, declaring free and compulsory primary education as the fundamental right of every child. Legislators in the southern Sindh Province recently adopted a bill to make this a reality. But education activists say nothing has changed.

“The politicians themselves have ruined the education sector,” says Lal Khan Panhwar, a member of the Sindh Graduates Association. “There is no difference in the mindsets of the Taliban terrorists and our politicians. Both think the same way: They’re against education.”