COVID-19, 2020 and Students from Pakistan
The year 2020 had been the worst year for almost every mankind but had been a pretty awesome year for Pakistani students since all the educational institutions were off due to covid 19 pandemic almost for a year. Their interest in school closure paints a gloomy portrait of our teaching/learning outcomes. According to a report, the number of students enrolled in different institutes across Pakistan is 51,534,410. From whom, one rarely found someone raising a protest against the great shutdown of educational institutions.
The cause of low spirit and enthusiasm, having been engaged with schooling counts poor infrastructure of our institutes.
Lack of facility in Pakistani schools, colleges, and universities is one of the major issues which creates a lack of interest in students for their institutions. Many government schools have no proper facilities for students to do scientific experiments. The classrooms are broken-down and nasty including outdated books and syllabus. Many universities’ hostels are militarized which is a great push to kill student’s interest.
Similarly, outdated and traditionally made syllabus in our institutes is equally grown issue. We have very bad syllabus as compared to other developed countries. Pre-schooling is done from three to five years of age and it is only for rich family’s kids because it is not available in government schools and the poor parents can’t afford private schools.
Then the primary sector comes from class 1 to 5 with exams. In the primary sector, the kids are between 5 to 10 age and at this age, teachers start a competition among them in exams. The students are pressurized to achieve better marks in the exams and in this competition, the kids lose their interest in learning and in all these years they learn nothing just swot the books for passing the exams.
Further, middle sector comes 6 to 8 and then the high sector comes from 9 to 10 classes with the board examinations and these exams are the most dangerous exams creating lots of pressure on students due to which a number of students commit suicide. Then the intermediate sector comes from 11 to 12. And also the Pakistani textbook is terrible and really boring.
The textbooks are very old and the chapters are of 19 century. The government discusses the updates in the books but nothing practically is seen and observed. The books are based on history even though the primary sector books talk about history and kids are not interested in reading them. The basic books should be based upon those things on which kids could make their interest. History should be taught to senior kids. The Urdu language is the national language of the country and none of the students is interested in learning that. It is because the Urdu books are all about poetries and kids don’t want poetries.
However, to talk about the teachers they keep completely strange behaviour to the students. The teachers start comparing the students to each-other from the pre-schooling time and until they reach the middle sector they are completely discouraged and they themselves start thinking that they can’t do anything. In a student’s eyes, a teacher in Pakistan is a monster. The use of sticks and beating is very common in Pakistani schools which is completely unfair for the kids, and the same is in universities also. If a student argues with a teacher on a topic or on a question, instead of clearing the students doubts the teacher will reduce their GPAs even it is the duty of a teacher to clear each and every doubt of the students. And that’s why the students’ concepts aren’t clear and they just swot the things to pass the exams.
The students are too much pressurized by their families and teachers. The parents pressurize kids to get good marks and the books are really boring, so the students swot the lesson just for passing the exams and this swatting just wastes the students time and gives them nothing. Most of the students swot to get good marks in the exams, as because of the family pressure and also for getting admission in a university or for a job as marks are judged instead of capability you own. From childhood, the students are told by their teachers and parents just to get good marks in the exams, no matter whether you learn things or not. This pressure forces the student to swot and obviously without understanding things and only swatting the chapters is extremely boring.
Therefore, Pakistani students seem upset with learning and they often find it boring and exhausting to be enrolled in educational institutions. As mentioned above, the following reasons have not only broken the interest of students towards education but also heightened the ratio of illiteracy in the country.