Single National Curriculum has been acknowledged as one of the major area of interest by the current government. There are many institutions working on this policy areas in private domain as well. Riphah International University is continuously working and engaging the relevant stakeholders under the leadership of Dr Rashid Aftab and Zubair Safdar.
Punjab text book board has also done extensive exercise to develop the books and curriculum as per the framework given by federal government. They focused to develop a curriculum which is uniformly for all the students at each class. A big team of experts worked on it. Life skill education was the main focus to develop the curriculum, similarly, they also focused on the minority rights while developing curriculum under the guidelines given by Supreme Court of Pakistan. Dr. Tahir Mahmood (Former Director Curriculum, Punjab Text Book Board) said, our main focus was to develop a student who considered as non-biased Muslim student consisting the attributes of patience, struggling for best fit in society and competing the challenges.
The efforts and contributions of private sector are also admirable and they deserve appreciation for working with government entities by proving feedback and quality filed experience. Mr. Shahid Warsi (CEO, Association for Academic Quality – AFAQ) comprehensively analyzed the developments in perspective of curriculum. He emphasized, It’s an important topic regarding curriculum development is taken by Riphah university. I have more than 20+ years in this field if we look into past about the curriculum document developed in 2005 and then in 2020 is a good initiative by government.
This document is more organized as per previous document and supportive to writer, authors and publishers as well. Let me explain the improvement being done in this document briefly here in this session. Learning areas, standards, benchmark and finally the students learning outcome defined. If these four attributes are well written than it surely help the author to write the desired book. As for as 2005 document is concern it was not well organized, guidelines for writer was not available and as a result the content was not limited to fixed pages.
Being the representative of government and Joint Educational Advisor NCS Team, Ministry of Federal Education Planning & Training, Pakistan, Mr. Rafique Tahir said, SNC development Process is based on the flowing key aspects: Teaching of Quran & Sunnah, Vision of Quaid & Iqbal, Constitutional framework, National polices, aspiration and national standard, Alignment with the goal, Emerging international trends in teaching learning and assessment, Outcome based approaches , Focus of values, life skill based and inclusive education, Respect and appreciation for different culture and religion in local and global context, Promotion of intellectual, Spiritual, aesthetic, emotional, social and physical development learner, Move away from rote memorization and focus on project, Development of 21st century skill including analytical critical and creative thinking, Use of information and communication technology and Alignment with trends in International mathematics and science study. He further discussed the Guiding framework document for SNC, Curriculum structure, Content of SNC, Achievement, The languages Question, Model Textbooks Development, Salient features of the model Textbooks, and Teacher Training for the implementations of SNC interventions.
Prof. Dr. Anis Ahmad (Vice Chancellor Riphah International University Islamabad) is an authority on education. He said , I am happy to see experts and educationist in this forum at Riphah University.
It’s a useful webinar. Identification of national education goals is very much important. There should be loud thinking to identify these goals. We have 70 years of secular mind set who is focusing on minorities which is 4% of population. Islamic studies is not a subject it’s a comprehensive study which should be part of each subject referring Islam in each topic and subject. We should not have any excuse to inculcate these Islamic teachings in each subject. As far as international curriculum standards are concern we should not rely on them these are colonial mind set, we should develop our own standards and benchmarks based on our ideology rather than secular and non-Islamic ideologies. Nations are built on ideologies not on basic sciences subjects.
Even US curriculum based on Americanization. 97% of Pakistan population is Muslim and our teachings should be drawn from Islamic ideology. Ideology of Pakistan which is ideology of Islam should be part of national curriculum as secular mind set wants to remove these from curriculum but it is not acceptable at all.
