For the past 14 years, I have been teaching and managing a government school. If I had to sum up my experience over those years in one sentence, it would be — the government intentionally ignores educating the nation and keep engaging the teachers in the non-academic task.

I Wish Every Parent Knew This- Dr. Afzal Badshah

Unfortunately, I have witnessed heartbreaking stories about children and parents. Pakistani society is deeply divided, with each group separated from the others. The stack holders want to maintain this distance and low literacy level in sequence to continue ruling. This is the only reason, in my opinion, why the teacher isn’t allowed to teach in the classroom.

Yesterday, one of the institution’s heads called to tell me that they only have seven teachers for nine classes. One of the seven teachers has been assigned to the Census Bureau, another to the Agriculture Department, a third to the Election Commission, and two others to the Examination duty.

Actually, the reason for his call was to ask if he had the authority to stop some of these teachers because the remaining two teachers for nine classes are unable to control the children in the school only if the teaching activities are ignored.

I shared with him that the stakeholders are purposefully malfunctioning to educate the children. This is not limited to one school; almost every school is dealing with the same issues. The main duties of a Pakistani teacher are to handle agriculture during harvesting season, assist the revenue department during their extreme days, support hospitals in emergencies, work in markets to assist the region’s bureaucracy, and much more.

In addition to teaching in the classrooms, they will be assigned a variety of other duties if they join the school. Teachers are never observed or questioned about teaching; however, they are questioned about other duties for which the government provides other employees who are not used or trained.

For a moment if these duties are put aside, and all the teachers are sent to the school then the ratio between students, classes and teachers is terrible. This ratio is acceptable in cities, but it is highly harmful in rural areas. For example, about 8 years ago, my village school had one teacher and 400 students; today, the school has 385 students and four teachers. The four teachers are responsible to teach 12 classes of high school.

On the other hand, the parents are crushed by the burden of financial issues. They only want to provide food and shelter for their children. In the evening, they are only concerned with feeding their children. Educating their children is not a priority in such a dire situation.

As a teacher and administrator, I sometimes found it difficult to bear the situation, seeing these children waste away with nothing to save them. It hurt me internally when I saw the stakeholder’s protocol and lifestyle, utilizing poor people’s earnings and resulting in them having nothing to eat or read.

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