T HE government has initiated many reforms in the education sector.

Unfortunately many of them are mere a bureaucratic whitewash.

Starting f rom the student enrollment process to teacher selection criteria and authoritarian hierarchies, none has achieved the desired results because at the end of the day the people who are supposed to benefit most from these reforms i.e. teacher, student and parents receive the least benefit and therefore they are least interested in them.

To understand what is wrong with these reforms, one has to only have a look at what happens daily in a public school, particularly in the rural areas.

The first and most arduous task of a teacher is to collect students from their homes. Girls are not allowed to leave home and made to help in household while the boys are sent to work to help their f amilies earn a livelihood. On the other handteachers who do not show a 100 per cent attendance have to suf fer consequences.

Once the teacher gets the students to school, there they are forced to sit so-called `surprise` tests that are provided beforehand by the authorities. Even if students can`t perform well, cheating for better marks options are always available to one and allstudents, teachers and the authorities. The same practice is repeated in the annual exams and you have a one hundred per cent result.

In the second half of the day, the teacher shif ts to the clerk mode. Manual lists of children out of school, drop-outs, where`s the school`s grant money is spent, even lists of furniture etc are made daily. Hours are spent in making redundant lists which no one reads.

The same teachers are time and again, out of school to perform election and other such duties. For these reasons training, improvement in teachers` criteria, mergers and rationalisation of schools have never worked in the past.

Blindly following Western policies won`t work. For Pakistan, education reforms have to go hand in hand with child labour reforms, poverty and unemployment reduction and f amily planning. Moreover, a f ree and f air examination system is a prerequisite to make the education system deliver. Only then can policies be made that address the root cause of problems in education.

Rabiya Tariq Sargodha