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Four
steps to ensure an adequate number of schools
By YesPakistan.com Staff
Writer
How can Pakistan ensure
that all of its children have access to at least a primary school education?
This question has been discussed at length by human development experts and
activists. One of the first strategies is to provide the necessary resources
to run a school. Paramount among these is ensuring there are enough facilities
where schooling can take place.
There are four ways that
Pakistan can work to provide enough schools to impart basic education to its
children.
The first is to improve
the often sub-standard and intolerable school facilities that currently exist.
Two basic facilities the
government could focus on improving are the presence of toilets and electricity.
In Pakistan, 73 percent of schools have no electricity and 70 percent of primary
schools have no toilets. To add to this misery, 68 percent of schools have no
safe drinking water and 60 percent of school buildings do not even have a boundary
wall.
This makes it clear that
there is considerable scope for improving the condition of existing primary
schools in Pakistan. Simply repairing existing schools instead of building new
ones would provide adequate schools for primary school aged children in many
regions.
It is estimated that something
as simple as clearing classrooms that have been used to store broken furniture
could increase school capacity in Pakistan by up to 10 percent.
A second strategy is to
carefully plan and map out the location of new schools well in advance of construction.
It is this lack of planning that has led to a serious waste of limited resources.
For example, over 3,000
schools in rural areas of Pakistan have been erected that are attended by less
than 10 students. Another 2,000 schools that have been built no enrolment at
all. The schools are too far away from the local population for children to
be able to truly benefit from them. If planning was done at the district level,
taking into account the local region's population density, such waste could
have been avoided.
A third important strategy
is to support the existence of non-formal schools. Although the majority of
Pakistani children receive primary education through the formal school system,
non-formal education programs are an important supplement to meet education
demands. This is especially true for children who live and work in areas where
schools either do not exist or do not fit their circumstances. For instance,
non-formal schools meet the needs of working children who cannot attend formal
schools because they work when school is on.
However, the quality of
education provided through non-formal methods must be the same as that provided
through the formal school system. Pakistan must not create a two-tiered system
of education with haves and have-nots, where high-quality formal schools compete
with low-quality non-formal schools.
Finally, the Pakistani government
can encourage private initiatives in education to lift some of the pressure
on the country's severely crowded urban schools.
However, the problem that
private schools introduce is that they serve as encouragement for rich families
to withdraw from public schools in favor of the private schools, thus reducing
their commitment to public education morally and financially. Recently though,
some studies indicate that a number of private schools in Pakistan do cater
to low-income households as well.
Although building enough
schools will not be enough to ensure universal primary enrolment, it is an important
and necessary step in improving the accessibility of education to Pakistan's
children.
Date/Time Last Modified: 6/17/2002 3:44:32 PM
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