| Submit your comments on this article |
| India-Pakistan |
| Education disaster |
| 2015-04-17 |
| [DAWN] The story goes back to the year 2000 when 1,100 participants from 164 countries assembled in Dakar (Senegal ... a nation of about 14 million on the west coast of Africa bordering Mauretania to the north, Mali to the east, and a pair of Guineas to the south, one of them Bissau. It is 90 percent Mohammedan and has more than 80 political parties. Its primary purpose seems to be absorbing refugees... ) for the World Education Forum. The Dakar moot set for itself the goal of 'Education for All' and underpinned it with six specific targets to be achieved by 2015. Unesco stepped forward to monitor progress on these goals annually. Thus an independent team was constituted and the Global Monitoring Report was born. GMR 2015 was launched last week and summed up the achievements of countries in the education sector. The score card is not too inspiring. The key finding is that only half of all countries have reached the goal of universal primary education. The report says 80 million more children are in school today than 15 years ago. But the worrisome reality is that millions of children and adolescents are still out of school as states have failed to keep pace with the growing world population. For us Pakistain is of primary concern. Being the sixth most populous country in the world and a major contributor to the global pool of illiteracy Pakistain is now widely seen as a basket case. Aaron Benavot, director of the EFA Global Monitoring Report, says, "Three years since Malala Yousafzai ...a Pashtun blogger and advocate for girls' education from Mingora, in Swat. She started blogging at age 11-12. She was 15 when a Talib boarded her school bus and shot her in the head in 2012. She was evacuated to a hospital in Britain and the Pak Taliban vowed to kill her and her father. Among other awards, she received the 2014 Nobel Peace Prize, which she deserved more than Barack Obama, Jimmy Carter, Al Gore, Yasser Arafat, or Rigoberta Menchu... was shot for speaking out about her struggle, and that of other maidens of tender years, to get a decent education a new Unesco report has revealed that little has changed in Pakistain. It remains the only country outside of sub-Saharan Africa to be in the bottom 10 countries in the world for overall achievement towards Education for All." |
| Posted by:Fred |