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'We have yet to be clear on what quality edu is'
KARACHI, March 21(PPI): Sindh Education Minister Dr Hamida Khuhro Tuesday said
that quality education was concept that was yet to be defined.
Addressing a two-day national conference on Education for Sustainable
Development (ESD) in Pakistan, organised by the International Union for
Conservation of Nature (IUCN) Pakistan, she said that a lot had been written by
scholars on this subject, however it was generally accepted that quality of
education was an integrated concept.
"It is not limited to teaching
formal subjects in schools, but enabling teaching and the learning process,"
Khuhro said. She said that the role of the informal process of learning through
wider involvement of the community and society, played an important part, and
creating linkages between each subject, teaching it with the social, economic
and environment needs of the society, was a basic component of a quality
education programme.
Khuhro said that the Sindh Government, in its
efforts to promote education, had given top priority to quality education. The
government, she said, believed that opening new schools and making children
attend them would not bring about a change, instead it was what was being taught
and learnt at these schools, how it was being taught, and what was the role of
the community and the larger society in addressing the challenges in providing
quality education, that would achieve the desired results.
The minister
said that quality of education was an evolving concept. "There are many
instances whereby educators and especially people in the development sector who
work in close to real life situations, come up with notions that enable us to
support the concept of quality education, and ESD is one of them," she said.
Khuhro said that sustainable development was the key to progress in the coming
years. She said that during the last two centuries, we had utilised our natural
resources in an unsustainable manner, resulting in detrimental effects on our
environment, society and economy. "Additionally, the education process has also
been inactive on this front. Therefore, people are less and less aware of the
repercussions of the unsustainable model of development," she remarked. This,
she said, was what one wished to see as an outcome of a quality education
process whereby decisions were made for the sustainable future of the country.
Talking about the conference, she said that this conference was about
promoting the concept of ESD in Pakistan. "ESD is no more a school-based
phenomena. It is about learning in all spheres of life, as educators,
journalists, businessmen, technical experts, civil society experts, whichever
field we are part of. It is about changing the mindset to promote sustainable
lifestyles through wise decision-making that addresses the social, environmental
and economic future of world," Khuhro stressed.
She said that the
government had already made a move for addressing the issue of quality education
through integrating ESD in local level education planning. She congratulated the
Badin District Government for developing a comprehensive plan for the district
and the IUCN Pakistan for providing their support in developing this plan. The
minister asked the IUCN Pakistan and the UNESCO to extend support in order to
implement this model in other districts of Sindh.
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