Education with a difference

By Islamuddin

The lack of meaningful education is the biggest challenge facing Pakistan and without overcoming this challenge Pakistan can neither develop nor overcome extremism and the culture of intolerance. This situation has persisted in spite of our spending enormous resources in teacher training and mushroom growth of institutions for teacher training.
In this background when I received a letter from the Professional Development Central, Chital (PDCC) of the Aga Khan University informing me that I have been nominated for a six week certificate course in Educational Leadership and Management (ELM), I was in a fix whether to attend the course or not.. Some friends expressed the opinion that there is not much to be learnt from these trainings. As the first segment of the course was due to start in January and I had no other commitments during the month, I decided to join the course. The way the course opened and progressed, I was happily surprised to know that there was so much to be learnt and shared.
The theories and practices discussed during the course had been picked up from successful models around the world, tested and implemented in advanced countries. Discussions on the best practices and their contextualization proved to be fascinating areas for committed teachers. After going through these intensive sessions, the course participants were able to make out sense as to why our education system was not producing desired results. There was consensus among trainees that our teachers fail to be pedagogical leaders. For them teaching was just a job, which only attracted the disgruntled, who lacked commitment to teach and to improve their capacity. Our traditional training modules only re-enforced the existing mindset that trainings were of no practical use except for TA/DA and technical requirements for promotion or a break from school drudgery. No efforts are made to re-engineer the correct mindset, so as to mould the trainees to
become genuine teachers.
The training at PDCC was different. It not only addressed the issue of human re-engineering but also the business process re-engineering. It brought about paradigm shift-in the attitude of trainees and gave them the much needed skills to improve the education scene. The only complaint from the trainees was that they were not allowed space to change things in their institutions. However at the end of the first segment of the training programme the trainees were convinced that given commitment and capacity, way can be found to improve things within the existing system.
There is an urgent need to expand the training activities of PDCC, not only in the education sector but also to extend it to other professions, specially in enterprise development without which Chitralis can not benefit from the post-Lowari emerging world economic order. It is unfortunate that the proposed opening of Aga Khan University campus in Chitral with EU funding, could not materialize and opportunity to gain global reach in education was lost, at least for the time being. In this scenario PDCC provides us a silver lining to update skills of professionals in education and hopefully in other sectors in not too distant a future.
PDCC has proved to be a global level training institution which has brought the most advanced knowledge and skills at the door steps of Chitralis. On the basis of my experience at PDCC I can say with confidence that it will be able to make a difference in our much neglected education sector. It is encouraging to see that all the instructors at PDCC are Chitralis, who know our context. The team is ably led by Dr.Afzal, again a Chitralis, with tremendous commitment to PDC vision. This generous and unassuming scholar along with his dedicated team has put Chitral on the educational map of Pakistan. Today professionals from different parts of Pakistan, including Kashmir and FATA are availing the training opportunities at PDCC. For me my two week stay at PDCC has been most rewarding. It has helped me to conceptualize and contextualize the knowledge and skills that I already have and has also given me additional knowledge and skills to be
more efficient and effective. I found the standard of its faculty and resources to be of global standard of which I have ample experience as I have gone through the training processes at leading institutions like CSA and NIPAs etc. It would be in the fitness of things that the Govt. should get its teachers trained at PDCC and PDCC, on its part should consider starting regular teachers training programmes like PTC,CT,B.Ed and M.Ed to improve the standard of professionalism among teachers and prevent mushroom growth of fake institutions.