AhsanAmin
FULL MEMBER
- Joined
- Nov 8, 2013
- Messages
- 798
- Reaction score
- 19
- Country
- Location
I, as a Pakistani, believe that major reason behind most of our social and economic woes, as a nation, is our inability to impart good education to the children of our nation. Though there are good schools in larger cities, in rest of the Pakistan, we mostly have a very poor school infrastructure, poorly designed syllabus, badly trained teachers and cultural apathy towards the importance of good education. And we, as a nation, have become totally complacent with this poor state of education system and there is rarely any government effort to build a new and comprehensive state school system by updating and revamping the existing schools and building new schools where they are required.
I believe that it could take 10-20 billion dollars to build a comprehensive network of schools in Pakistan where children could get state of the art education at par with anywhere in rest of the world. And this long term investment could entirely change the future of Pakistani nation with huge rewards after 10-15 years. And this money could be raised by a combination of state expenditure, special taxes, international aid, and long term loans on soft terms by friendly countries. All we need is a strong will to act now and do a comprehensive research towards building a new basic education system. Though we would need a strong vigilance system to make sure there is no corruption in these large scale projects and all the transparency requirements are fulfilled. And I am sure if we have a resolve to do things right, 10-20 billion dollars can easily be arranged over 4-5 years and this is not a very large price to pay to build the foundations of a better future of our country. Every political party should include this program in their coming election agenda and then implement it when they get into government.
I really think that good universities in Pakistan should make multidisciplinary groups/teams of researchers that would study all different aspects of the existing education system in the particular country. Of course, these researchers would come from all different areas relevant to education of children including the experts related to child education and child psychology that could help develop a framework for children education methods, experts in education methods in various subjects, experts in school administration, experts that have studied teacher training and methods that motivate better teachers and how to implement teacher training and teacher motivation methods in schools, experts in extra-curricular activities and sports and how these things could be properly introduced in schools, and experts who can evaluate the costs related to development of various school infrastructure and allied teacher training activities and experts that would develop best possible syllabus and how to introduce various ideas to children in the best possible ways. And these experts would also work on the costs associated with developing/improving a national school infrastructure and its impact on economy in terms of greater economic activity and future benefit to the nations in terms of more talented citizens who would be on the forefront of science and technology and social sciences. I am sure most of these things are well known to a lot of different experts and researchers in various education fields but it would be a great idea to put a lot of these experts together to make a multidisciplinary team that could give recommendations to their national governments or other education bodies towards revamping or improving the existing education systems. And really I do consider it important that it should be a priority of the research groups to work with the goal in mind that the education system should make it as easy as possible to get an excellent education with minimum burden at least to those children whose parents cannot otherwise afford good education. And the researching teams should also work out methods of education especially tailored to places or communities where parents have a poor or uneducated background and how to tackle related complications that arise when their children go to school. Just like we talk about human rights and similar other ideas, we should also talk about rights of every child to be able to get a good education despite his/her possibly poor or backward background. And in places where lack of tolerance and religious radicalism is a problem, society has to make an extra effort to teach the children in a way to promote respect for different opinions, religions and different lifestyles and learn to appreciate diversity in people and their ideas. In remote and sparsely populated areas of Pakistan, poor citizens have no means of transport to take their children to school and state must ensure that transport is provided to every child in remote villages.
And I want to really mention that basic education is usually not considered the most prestigious area of research but once good, talented and hard-working researchers in children education put together comprehensive research work on great education of the children, their impact on society and contribution to society would be far greater than the impact on society all those researchers in hot and innovative science research areas and I am very sure that society would acknowledge this contribution and give the right great respect that researchers in child education actually deserve when they work towards putting together great ideas and comprehensive plans. And I think that best universities in Pakistan should take the initiative in putting together cross-disciplinary and inter-university groups that would research on these ideas and Pakistani government should generously support these teams of researchers.
I have also written about these ideas in my post 864 here: https://forum.wilmott.com/viewtopic.php?f=15&t=94796&start=855
Last edited by a moderator: