Educational facilities should be the same for boys and girls

Speakers at a seminar said that all sectors including the chamber of commerce or the corporate sector should be engaged in any discourse on education policy making and its implementation. These views were expressed by them on a seminar on "Empowerment through girls' education in contemporary Muslim societies" organised by Pakistan Coalition for Education (PCE), in collaboration with and support of Dubai Cares and Oxfam GB on Saturday.
This conference was the second of a series of conferences that PCE would conduct in all provincial capitals to culminate into an international conference, next month. The speakers stated that attitudes towards education need to be changed by engaging the media and religious personalities in a positive way. The educational facilities provided to girls should be equal in all respects to those provided to boys.
They also said that the transmission of knowledge is not the only objective. Social development, economic development and freedoms of thought and expressions are the prime objectives and so the curricula should be redesigned in a way that students begin to demand their basic right of freedom of expression and thought.
Speakers suggested that medium of exchange of ideas cannot be limited to a formal classroom alone. Non-formal education has already been introduced in Pakistan but the country is not harvesting the indigenous knowledge or informal knowledge. The challenge of limited literacy is so vast, that a school alone cannot resolve it.
They also suggested that girls have a greater risk of aborting their educational development, if the home to school distance is vast. A geographic analysis is essential to identify areas where the enrolment rate is low. Contract teacher schemes, free books are policy interventions that need to be scaled up. Speaking on the occasion Director of 'Centre for Humanities and Social Sciences at Lahore School of Economics Dr Shahid Siddiqui, said that social transformation of the society can achieved through widespread education.