Category Archives: Education

Teaching in mother tongue

Education, Language

By Zubeida Mustafa
Source: Dawn

NADIA is a bright and intelligent child of eight. Her mother — a housemaid — has a dream. She wants to educate her children so that they can lift themselves out of the grinding poverty that has been their parents’ lot. Happily that is what President Pervez Musharraf says he also wants. But probably, he does not have a clue as to how to go about it.

Take Nadia’s case. She attends a private school (charging a monthly fee of Rs300) near her home in a low income locality of Karachi. With her mother’s help she has learnt to read and write Urdu fluently. I talked to her about the moon and the stars and explained the concepts of tens and units – in Urdu. She understood what I told her perfectly since this is a language she is familiar with. That night she even went out in the courtyard to explore the celestial bodies.
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The language conundrum

Education, Language

By Zubeida Mustafa
Source: Dawn

THE government is once again about to experiment with the education system in Pakistan. The federal education minister, Lt Gen (retd) Javed Ashraf Qazi, a former ISI chief, has now announced a revised schedule for the language reforms to be introduced in schools.

From September 2007 (instead of 2006) students of class one will be taught science and mathematics in English, while Islamiat and Pakistan Studies will be taught in Urdu.

It is not very clear where the mother tongues, namely Sindhi, Punjabi, Pushto and Balochi, will fit in the new scheme of things. According to the minister, in five years the language policy will allow the authorities to eliminate the distinction between the English and Urdu medium schools and “homogenise them in one single entity”.
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School adopters in a dilemma

Education

By Zubeida Mustafa
Source: Dawn

THE adopt-a-school project launched by the Sindh Education Foundation (SEF) under its dynamic managing director, Prof Anita Ghulam Ali, in 1997 faces a dilemma.

Having peaked in 2004 when 251 schools enjoyed the benefits of sponsorship, the scheme now has only 150 institutions in its fold. Having shown that a public-private partnership in education can work, the adopt-a-school system has opened the way for others to follow suit.

There are a number of adoption schemes now in vogue at multiple tiers. For instance, there are schools that are adopted by private individuals and still have their links with the SEF. There are other schools that have been adopted with encouragement from the Sindh education department that has created partnerships to ease its own financial burden — the private sector enters the scheme to pay for the adopted school’s physical infrastructure.
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Who is to educate our youth?

Education

By Zubeida Mustafa
Source: Dawn

LAST Friday Prof Muhammad Yunus, nicknamed the banker for the poor from Bangladesh, was nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize 2006. It is an honour that he and the Grameen Bank, the institution he founded, fully deserve.

Though it has not been generally noted, Prof Yunus has moved on from his original initiative of providing easily accessible micro credit without collateral to the poor, especially the doubly oppressed — that is the women.
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What of education for the poor?

Education

By Zubeida Mustafa
Source: Dawn

AT A time when the poverty line and the number of people living below it in Pakistan are being hotly debated, there is another issue that needs to be addressed. That is the opportunity a poor person has to improve his economic and social status. Is it inevitable that a person at the bottom of the heap should be destined to remain there for many generations to come?

Unfortunately, that is how it is in this country, even though theoretically there is nothing to bar a person from striving for self-improvement and make progress. But the fact is that our society is so stratified economically that social and economic mobility is well nigh impossible for a person from the low income group. Even the power structure operates against the poor. In Europe we often hear stories of the sons and daughters of working class parents rising to become prime ministers of their country. Could one ever dream of that here?
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