Punjab Government’s online curricula portal: Social Sciences, Arts, Humanities and Urdu ignored

The first ever “E‑Learning” web­site with com­plete text of cur­ricu­lum has been inau­gu­rat­ed by the Chief Min­is­ter She­hbaz Sharif. www.elearning.punjab.gov.pk con­tains text and sup­port­ing tuto­ri­als, ani­ma­tions and sim­u­la­tions for bet­ter learn­ing. This online facil­i­ty was inau­gu­rat­ed last week by the CM at Arfa Karim Soft­ware Tech­nol­o­gy Park. For the first time ever in Pak­istan, the com­plete con­tent of text­books is being made freely avail­able to the stu­dents.

But so far the web por­tal con­tains only the con­tent on nat­ur­al sci­ences and is avail­able only for Eng­lish-medi­um stu­dents. Experts have shown con­cerns over pre­fer­ring job-ori­ent­ed sub­jects while ignor­ing arts and social sci­ences. Defi­cien­cy of Urdu medi­um books on the web indi­cates offi­cials’ con­fu­sion over the selec­tion of medi­um of edu­ca­tion for schools. Government’s fail­ure to give due impor­tance to Urdu and resolve the issue of Urdu-Eng­lish dichoto­my high­lights its inef­fi­cien­cy to for­mu­late and imple­ment poli­cies on per­ma­nent basis.
How­ev­er gen­er­al­ly edu­ca­tion­ists have appre­ci­at­ed this step and fur­ther empha­sized on mod­ern­iz­ing the con­tent and the meth­ods of teach­ing. Accord­ing to experts most of the stu­dents choose sci­ence sub­jects for the prospects of a more reward­ing career, but many of them fail to under­stand the con­cepts and devel­op a sci­en­tif­ic way of think­ing. They rather con­cen­trate on mere­ly improv­ing their grades.

Chem­istry, Physics, Biol­o­gy and Math­e­mat­ics have been added in the con­tent list for the stu­dents of 9th and 10th grade. The CM has how­ev­er announced plans to add the con­tents of all text­books in future.