(23 September, 2015)
Pakistan Businessmen and Intellectuals Forum (PBIF) on Wednesday said dysfunctional education system has become a threat to the country as it continue to damage masses, trade and industry.
The education system has failed to provide skilled manpower needed to industrial sector ensuring growth resulting in national development, it said.
The experience of neglecting public sector and relying on the private sector to improve literacy rate and provide quality education in a competitive environment has failed therefore government should focus on improve public school system, said PBIF President and former provincial minister Mian Zahid Hussain.
He said that a good majority of the private schools are being run for profit only contributing nothing to the society unless they are stringently regulated as government is bound to prefer public interest under any circumstances.
Mian Zahid Hussain noted that Public schools are in pathetic condition, teachers are getting salaries without attending schools, students are forced to pay for private tuition and number of ghost schools and ghost teachers continue to increase.
He said that 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.
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.
Decades of negligence by governments have reduced growth rate of public schools to eight percent while private schools have filled the gap growing by 60 percent.
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. While seminaries are imparting free education to million the private schools can also do it.
