Nasira Habib

Education in Pakistan is crying for help. Thirty per cent of Pakistanis live in extreme educational poverty-having received less than two years of education. At current rates of progress, Balochistan has to wait for the next century to be able to guarantee children their constitutional right to education while Punjab can achieve that only in 2041, Sindh in 2049 and Khyber Pakhtunkhwa in 2064.

And those who are able to attend school, only thirty five per cent of rural school children can read a story while fifty per cent cannot read a sentence. They don’t fare really better than out of school children twenty four per cent of whom can read a story showing almost a parallel performance. What a great performance by those at the helm of affairs.

Lack of political will is the core that breeds so many factors responsible for this tragic state of affairs.  More than twenty one thousand schools don’t have school buildings while thirty thousand need major repairs or are in dangerous conditions.  Thirty nine per cent schools don’t have boundary walls, thirty eight per cent are without latrines, thirty five percent without drinking water and sixty one per cent are without electricity. True, it is important to guarantee the provision of all these prerequisites so that an enabling environment could be created for the learners. But there are other prerequisites which precede all other prerequisites without which erection of buildings and provision of electricity and drinking water becomes meaningless. The first and foremost is the curriculum that is relevant to the specific needs of the learners and the country and is responsive to the changing realities. Such curriculum demands ongoing development and experimentation of teaching and learning methodologies which are sensitive to the specific learning and assessment needs without blindly aping the ideas imported from alien conditions and cultures . This leaves us with the gigantic task of developing competent and committed teachers as incompetence breeds de-motivation among them.  Development of teachers requires training, follow-up and refreshers at regular intervals which are based on feedback from the field. The development of teachers does not mean just prescriptive training but ongoing research on what is happening in schools, what are the learning outcomes, what are the gaps and bottlenecks and how to respond to them.  Education is not something static. In order to make it responsive to the need of the hour there should be lively discussions and serious debates among teachers and other stakeholders on the issues and challenges. And before anything else a teacher has to have a solid academic background.

The neglect of the core prerequisites has resulted in the near collapse of the edifice of education in Pakistan. The seriousness of the authorities can be gauged from the amount of resources allocated for the purpose and the willingness to try and adopt innovative methodologies developed by the non-governmental sector.We have just entered a new century but the bleak picture is forcing us to talk about waiting for the next century to be able to provide basic education at the current pace.

If there is a real commitment, achieving effective literacy in Pakistan does not require decades but is a matter of a few single digit years.

Talking of appropriate approaches and methodologies of teaching and learning I am reminded of the fruits of Khoj methodology which can be witnessed in the work and performance of the learners.

Let’s see how children are making progress in learning in the tiny village of Thathi Bhanguaan in the province of Punjab.

Performance of a 5 year old after learning written representations of 15 phonemes

This is a group of nineteen children between the ages of four and five years who participated in an activity and play focused early childhood care and development program for fifteen months. Then they were promoted to class one in November 2012 and were exposed to writing and reading. Using Khoj methodology they are taught reading through learning the art of writing first. In the process, first of all, they were exposed to the world of sounds, progressing from the sounds around them to the human speech organ through a range of activities. They are led to conceptually understand through listening to themselves how using sounds they make words. Once they are able to segment and blend words phonetically they are ready to learn the written representations of the phonemes in selected words. In less than four weeks they start writing sentences, which can run into hundreds, within the confines of the written shapes they have so far learnt to write. In a matter of six months, a learner is able to  have conceptual understanding of what is reading and writing and how it takes place. Reading and speaking take place within the process of writing.

The children have learnt the written representations of fifteen phonemes through segmenting phonemically and blending phonemically and phonologically both. Using the phonetic skills, they are also able to generate new words and sentences by changing the location of sounds with corresponding written shapes.

On 15^th February 2013 an assessment took place; it was a test of their phonemic and phonological understanding, learning of phonetic skills, application of this knowledge creating new words and writing words and sentences by joining written representations learnt so far including their different position specific shapes. Children were asked to write ten sentences as part of the assessment of their learning level. It was made sure that none of the sentences was read or written by them before.  The result was amazing. They wrote the words they had never written before progressing from one phoneme to the other, building phonic connections. They themselves were thrilled to see that they had constructed new words with the knowledge they had gained through the process of learning some words.

The teaching and learning of these literacy skills do not take place in isolation but the whole process is embedded in a host of life skills and knowledge emerging from active thinking, participation, dialogue and action.

An international evaluation called this way of teaching a fast track method which has tremendous potential of making the whole nation literate and logical in thinking.

Khoj methodology is a good news for everybody serious about education for all in Pakistan in a short span of time.