03/08/2016
Quaid e Azam’s message to the first National Education Conference held in 1947 after the creation of Pakistan.
Authors:
Amnah Imtiaz, and Prof. Muhammad Imtiaz Rasool
The importance of education and the type of education cannot be over emphasized…there is no doubt that the future of our state will and must greatly depend upon the type of education we give to our children and the way in which we bring them up as future citizens of Pakistan… We should not forget that we have to compete with a world which is moving very fast in this direction.
The holding of conference in 1947 is a reflection of importance of education which Quaid e Azam had in his mind. There are three points in his speech - Importance of education, type of education and ways of imparting education. When Pakistan was founded, 85% of population was illiterate and in certain areas of the country such as Baluchistan, the illiteracy rate was even lower, being virtually zero among rural women. After 70 years, can we claim that illiteracy rate has dropped to almost zero? Even now, the literacy rate in Baluchistan among rural women less than 10%.
Seeing the practices of developed countries, type of education definitely mean forecasting the future needs of the country such as competitive edge of business, technology, science and other professional education. In USA Information Technology has become a core feature of all the degree programs in USA. Within the next 10 years, statistics have shown that they will be needing more IT personnel.
Third point raised by Quaid e Azam was regarding the ways of imparting the education. He meant a uniform mode of delivery. In Pakistan, there are three modes. Public, private and Madrassa.They are running parallel with an antagonistic attitude to one another. Despite emphasis on tertiary education, none of our universities is among top 500, whereas, the primary education is the most neglected one with higher dropout rates and inability to get admission.
If we really want to compete in the world, we will have to act very fast according to the vision of Quaid e Azam in order to lessen the gap in education between developed countries and ourselves.
