Moalims

ISLAMABAD: The Pakistan Businessmen and Intellectuals Forum (PBIF) on Wednesday said that the dysfunctional education system has become a threat to the country as it continues to damage masses, trade and industry.

The education system has failed to provide skilled manpower needed to the industrial sector in order to ensure growth in national development, said PBIF President and former provincial minister Mian Zahid Hussain in a statement on Wednesday.

He said the experience of neglecting the public sector and relying on the private sector to improve literacy rate and provide quality education in a competitive environment has failed, therefore the government should focus on improving public school system.

He said a good majority of the private schools are being run for profit only, and would contribute nothing to the society unless they are stringently regulated by the government.

He noted that the public schools are in pathetic condition, teachers are getting salaries without attending schools, whereas the students are forced to pay for private tuition and number of ghost schools and ghost teachers continue to increase.

He said 5.5 million children are not going to school in Pakistan, literacy is second lowest in the world, country lags behind India and Nepal in school going girls and Pakistan is second in the world in number of unskilled youth.

The poor and lower middle income people compromise on necessities to get their children quality education for a good future but their investment in going down the drain, he added.

The PBIF president said decades of negligence by the governments have reduced the growth rate of public schools to 8% while the private schools have filled the gap, growing by 60%. He said the government must make it mandatory for the private schools to provide free education to five students per class to lift their families out of poverty, adding that seminaries are imparting free education to million and the private schools can also do it.

News Reference