‘Ghost school’ refers to an educational institute that exists primarily on paper without enrolled students but provides little to no actual instruction on academic activity.
The blackboard still has scribbling from years ago, but the rooms no longer look like the classrooms. Children’s parents wonder if the building will ever be used for its original purpose. A building is present there allocated for school, funds are allocated for maintenance, and every month teachers are expected to teach children from all the surrounding villages because a salary is also given, but no one comes to teach, and no one looks after the maintenance of the building.
Nonfunctional or ghost schools are a result of neglect or corruption. Money allocated for these schools ends up in the pockets of bureaucrats, politicians and local school staff.
Statistics reveal that there are thousands of these schools in villages even after various provincial governments try to correct them. The majority of them are in Sindh and Baluchistan. In areas where people live in abject poverty and parents are desperate to give their kids a better life. People of villages feel that they are unemployed, and if their children get an education, they can go to cities and have better living, but the landlords can’t digest these ideas because they can’t see the poor rise from abject poverty and can’t bear being disobeyed or questioned. For centuries and from generation to generation, they have wanted these children to be treated as unquestioning slaves.
More than 2 million children in Pakistan are out of schools, and those who go to school get poor-quality education. While there is a broad consensus on the problem across the political spectrum in Pakistan, the actions needed to fix it are slow in coming.
The Silent Tragedy of Pakistan’s Ghost Schools
Instead of students, the school becomes a shelter place for cows, buffaloes and cattle. It’s only the register that fills the names of government teachers relocated to teach in these schools, but all is fake, and money allocated for school maintenance and the salaries of teachers all goes to unknown hands that are too powerful to be questioned.
To conclude, in the cities, private schools take huge fees, provide quality education, make students indulge in extracurricular activities and provide good grooming to the students, but as a contrast, children of villagers residing in villages are in abject poverty. They are illiterate and will remain so because no action is ever taken towards their betterment.
Addressing the Ghost School crisis demands proper action on accountability and political will. The most important action to be taken in this regard is implementing a biometric attendance and digital monitoring system for both staff and students, directly linking fund disbursement and salary payments to verified activity. Essentially, this effort must be coupled with local community empowerment thereby transforming passive school buildings into active, locally-owned educational assets.