Pakistan: Saving the sagging education in govt schools

Services of another seven government schoolteachers have been suspended in Quetta during a campaign launched by the Education Depart­ment against absentee teachers.
What to talk of Balochistan, thousands of teachers across the country remain absent from their duty over the past several years, but they are regularly drawing their salary.
Most of the teachers are either affiliated with the political parties or gratify the high-ups to escape punishment. The political influence mostly leads to the failure of the crackdowns launched in the past.
Apart from the absent teachers, a large number of schools are still reportedly working in papers only. Their funds are being misused either by the senior officials of the education departments or by the politically influential activists with the collaboration of the incumbent rulers. Social ill of absent school teachers stems from the allocation of job quotas for the sitting parliamentarians at the federal and provincial levels that ultimately results in appointment of the political workers in the government jobs, rendering the provincial education departments the worst victims.
The most unpleasant irony is that the most teachers, who managed to get jobs either using the political affiliation or through offering graft to the officials concerned, even do not qualify for the posts.
A majority of them did not have professional capability to teach or have extremely poor understanding of their subjects.
Thus imparting education in the government schools is non-existence therefore the country has seen a mushroom growth of educational institutions in the private sector that are extremely expensive thus a majority of the poor students cannot afford to attain education there.
The poor standard of education in the government schools is playing havoc with the fate of the talented but the poor youth who are left out of the race to meet merit to get admissions in the higher education.
They cannot join professional education at the higher level. At the end of day they are left to vie for inferior jobs meaning thereby that the government schools have become clerk-producing machineries.
And the merit-based jobs are being filled with the affluent class that manages to get education from the private institutions, attaining high percentage of marks in their examinations.
The emergence of the Punjab Group of Colleges and institutions like LUMs are classic examples to this effect. The education system in the country is inducing discrimination between the rich and the poor.
Across the world, the education systems are uniform for all the segments of the society offering equal opportunities to the rich and the poor alike to exile in future. Unfortunately this is not applicable in Pakistan just because of the wrong policies of the successive governments.
The poor state of affairs in the government schools and colleges will continue to haunt the poor till the government revisits its education policy that puts a strict surveillance over the government schools.
We once again advise the government to do away with the policy of allotting job quotas, leaving the space open for merit-based recruitments.
The political interference in the education institutions should also be eliminated, enforcing a strict discipline amongst officials of the education departments across Pakistan to revitalize the sagging education system in the country.