Dawn Editorial
By Khawar Ghumman
Friday, 11 Sep, 2009 | 06:05 AM PST

ISLAMABAD, Sept 10: The new education policy has only briefly touched the issue of madressahs and passed the buck to the interior ministry, suggesting setting up of a madressah education authority to bring them at par with mainstream education.

The policy has nothing to offer in concrete terms on how thousands of religious schools working in every nook and corner of the country would be mainstreamed.

According to statistics on the education ministry’s website, there are over 12,000 madressahs in the country with an enrolment of over 1.5 million students and around 55,000 teachers.

Madressah reform has long been a burning issue. Former president Gen (retd) Pervez Musharraf attempted to bring these institutions into mainstream, but failed because he lacked credibility with the Wafaqul Madaris.

Talking to Dawn, Marvi Memon of the PML-Q said the targets set under the new policy were good, but without a proper strategy and funding plan they were meaningless.

It sounded good that seven per cent of the GDP would be spent on the education sector to achieve an 85 per cent literacy rate, but without a plan the target would not be realised, she added.

She said madressah reform should be an integral part of the education policy.

“The responsibility of successful negotiations with the Wafaqul Madaris lies with political parties having a religious base.”

According to the new policy, the madressah education authority should be given the mandate to provide an opportunity for all existing and future madressahs to improve their standards.

The authority should provide funds for education and socio-economic welfare of students, develop infrastructure and equipment for improvement of existing facilities and provide further training to enhance skills of teachers.

Talking to Dawn, Higher Education Commission Chairman Dr Javed Leghari said the interior ministry had a role to play in managing madressahs because militancy was on the rise in the country, but madressahs could not be reformed without support from the ministries of religious affairs and education.

A senior university professor said the new policy had nothing to offer.

The policy talked about ambitious goals to be achieved by 2015, but did not say anything about the next year, he said.