NEWS reports said about 46 percent of teachers of the country’s secondary schools, colleges and madrasahs are not professionally trained as per disclosure made by the First Biennial Teacher Census. The Census said 65.72 percent of teachers at secondary schools are not trained and the situation us further worsen at the madrassahs where only 25.16 percent teachers are trained. What it means is that tens of thousands of children at such schools and madrasahs are being taught by teachers lacking decent subject-wise expertise or professional training. And this in turn means the poor education standards of teachers are producing poor students in the classrooms. We are deeply concerned about the impact this will have on the quality of higher education ending in poor career building. This is because if the foundation of education at primary, secondary and college level is not well set up, students will suffer at later stage and here we believe the training of teachers and developing their professionalism must be high on agenda. The census report showed we have so far miserably failed. Most important is quality of teachers for mathematics and science subjects; which is alarmingly low in our country. Time is running out, we must do everything to create trained teachers particularly in those science based subjects to change the course of education in the country from predominantly liberal arts studies to basic science. It is important to create a skilled manpower in the country to run the wheels of the economy now expanding at a higher rate and only better education can ensure it. . It was unforgivable to see massive errors in the marking of examination scripts of Primary School Certificate Exam- 2014 and a deeper look into the matter as news reports said showed that many examiners were corrupt in grading or not trained to perform the duty of examiner properly. The stark reality shows existing teachers are untrained and left to teach with less skills and few resources in classrooms. There is no alternative that we must invest more resources in education and recruiting good teachers and their effective training must be on the top of the agenda in our education sector. In our view the government should work to attract the best students to teaching and special teachers building programme may be launched with financial package to those who would register them to become teacher after completion of the course. There should be a minimum standard for entry to teaching as well to place best teachers in the classrooms to produce best manpower for future.
