The new educational year in Afghanistan will start with the advent of the new solar calendar year. According to statistics provided by the Ministry of Education of the Government of Afghanistan, there are about three million school-age students remain out of schools. This ministry recently announced that within three to four years these children will be absorbed in schools throughout the country and practically, no child would be left behind in primary education.
Quality is still sub-standard in public schools throughout the country and the Ministry of Education admits this failure. In recent years, there has come about a marked improvement in availability and the reach of educational opportunities to the country's children.
Expanding access to primary and secondary education came on the agenda of the international community and the government of Afghanistan. Hundreds of millions of dollars were poured into the country to rebuilt the destroyed educational system; thousands of schools were reconstructed or built anew throughout the country and the educational budget of the government was shored up manifold to enable recruitment of tens of thousands of teachers and provide educational material to students. As a result, millions of children, boys and girl, who could not access education before, enrolled in schools and availed primary and secondary education.
Primary and secondary education, as a system, is an important and integral part of any educational system anywhere across the world. Governments, particularly in other developing countries, devote a significant share of resources to making primary and secondary education available to all children of the school-going age.
"Universal Public Education" is a buzzword in many developing countries, whereby governments have made primary education compulsory for all children below a certain age. The argument is that in order to attain the goals of empowering the masses of poor and underprivileged and lifting their social and economic status, primary education is a must.
In Afghanistan, education is a particularly sensitive and important social sector that requires sustained and log-term attention of the government and international community. It is needless to mention that building a better Afghanistan of tomorrow, one in which people live in peace and prosperity and the dreams of whose children are not shattered, requires educated children of today who can be responsible and wise parents of tomorrow.
Even if one looks at the long-term prospects for Afghanistan in the areas of politics, war and peace, development, sustainable development, economic prosperity, having happy and successful citizens and so on, all these critically hinge on the factor of education. The children of yesterday were brutally neglected and kept far from education under the rule of a king of this country and the result was decades of war, lawlessness and conflict that destroyed the country and its people when those children turned adults.
If we are serious about turning a new page in the history of our country, the key again lies in educating our children of today. On other fronts too like health, development, economic prosperity and building a happy and successful society, all of them depend on whether we can provide quality education to children of Afghanistan.
In the country and in recent years, there has been impressive progress in providing education to children across the country. However, formidable challenges remain that are a matter of grave concern and worry. Even if the government of Afghanistan wishes to make primary education compulsory for every child of below the age of 12 across the country, many obstacles in the way would prevent achieving the goal.
Wars, conflicts, instability and lack of security still continue in many parts of the country which have resulted in closing down of schools and denial of basic education let alone quality education to millions of children. Hundreds of thousands of these children, male and female in many southern and eastern provinces continue to be denied education due to lack of security and a Taliban shadow rule which prohibits "science-based education". Excruciating poverty still keeps hundreds of thousands more from completing their primary education making them drop out in search of jobs as many of them happen to be the sole breadwinners for their poor families. Child labor equals denial of education to these children.
In other safer areas where there are functioning schools and even in cities and towns such as Kabul, the quality of education provided is poor. A significant percentage of teachers have had no formal training in teaching and are unaware of even the basic pedagogical techniques and principles that a teacher is supposed to know and employ inside the classroom.
The overall level of discipline and proper organization of students and teachers is low which is a drag on the educational system and discourages children from continuing their schooling. Educational and pedagogical material that can aid in education and teaching inside the classrooms is nowhere to be seen. Overall, the quality of education imparted to children in schools in many parts of the country remains poor. In the remote eastern, southern, northern and north eastern provinces, thousands of schools continue to lack buildings and classrooms where children and teachers can study in a comfortable and secure environment.
The salary and pay levels of teachers remain to be low even after years of promises made by educational policy makers in the government. This has worked to discourage teachers and keep them from devoting themselves wholeheartedly to their teaching profession and students.
These are some of the major problems in the way of providing primary and secondary education that is firstly of acceptable quality and secondly accessible to all children across the country. The issue of higher education and universities is altogether another issue that requires another article to be discussed. At present, focusing on education and allocating a major share of national income to this critical social sector will bring immense benefits to the country in the long run. The miraculous benefits will be seen and felt over 10 to 15 years from now if we can achieve the goals of providing universal education of high quality.
The miraculous benefits of education are because education also works as a powerful engine of social, economic and political change. Socially, a large corpus of educated adults of tomorrow can function as a strong counterbalance against militancy, terrorism, lawlessness and gun culture.
Economically, well-educated citizens of tomorrow can bring economic development and prosperity since economic growth is possible only when there is a large pool of educated human resources available. Politically, well-educated citizens bring stability and progress away from the dark years of the past. In other words, in bringing peace to the country, besides soldiers and security forces, every single child sitting in a classroom, over the long term, will be an additional counter-force against militancy and extremism.