Sir,
The shortage of language teachers has emerged as major challenge to the policy makers of School Education Department. Time and again, shortage of Urdu teachers in schools is being projected as dire need of Education Department. The main reason being that urdu is official language of the State and urdu knowing candidates get easily recruited in Revenue and Police Departments.
This is a matter of debate in the civil society why such importance is being given to urdu in the recent years when non-urdu knowing candidates appointed in Revenue, Police and Judiciary are doing a very nice job by learning urdu at their own level.
The idea to teach Urdu as second language in schools is not a new idea and it has been successfully implemented in schools of erstwhile tehsil Chenani, where training was imparted to hindi teachers by urdu knowing teachers during vacations. Similarly, Hindi teachers were deployed to teach hindi to urdu teachers and the results were that within two years all the teachers were capable to teach both Hindi and Urdu at Primary level. Last year, some unjustified recruitment was started in some districts for subject specific teachers. It is pertinent to mention here that subjectwise posts have not been sanctioned in the schools. It will consume years to collect data and distribute subject specific posts in schools. Such short term experiments do much harm than anything good in Education Department which has very complex system of organisation. In the given circumstances, the State Institute of Education and all the District Institutes of Education be asked to utilise the services of their subjects experts to train hindi and urdu Resource Persons within three months and these Resource Persons be directed to organise capsule courses of three months at Zonal level during vacations under supervision of DIET concerned. Within two years all the teachers can be trained to teach both hindi and urdu upto Primary level and there is no need to recruit only hindi/urdu teachers because it will block entry of other highly qualified candidates in Education Department. So all the DIETs be activated for bi-lingual training of teachers in future.
Rajinder Chand Anthal
Anthal House-Chenani
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