A number of parents have closed a school in Zujook village of Shahrestan district of the central Daikundi province. The parents urge the education authorities to address their demands and appoint more school teachers for their children.
Zarali, one of the protesters, complains that as many as 250 school students, who had been timetabled to attend the afternoon shift, were not taught school lessons completely even for a single day because there were not sufficiently assigned school teachers to teach them.
The headmaster of Zujook high school told Kabul Now that they did not have adequate teachers. He noted that school teachers who are working in the morning shift are unwilling to work in the afternoon shift without payment.
The protesters said they have sent a complaint letter to the governor’s office.
Rahmatullah Sirat, the provincial head of education directorate in Daikundi, said the province is in urgent need of more than 2,000 school teachers. He noted that in a school four teachers are in charge of schooling as many as 2,600 students.
Many students who talked to Kabul Now complained that most often they return to their homes without taking a single class.
The teacher shortage is one of the many challenges that Afghanistan education system is facing. Corruption coupled with mismanagement on the part of senior educational authorities is said to be a major source of a problem that leaves many schools in remote areas of the country without sufficient educational staff and equipment.
Though the central Daikundi province is secure, as locals say, many schools in this province face teacher shortages.
For the time being there are more than 4,000 school teachers and over 164,000 school students in the central Daikundi province, according to the official figures provided by the local government. More than 220 schools in this province do not have proper buildings and locals use tents as classrooms.
The education system in Afghanistan has adversely been affected by a bloody conflict. In most Taliban-controlled areas, attending school, especially for girls, remains yet an unfulfilled dream.
According to the official records, nearly 3.7 million Afghan children were deprived of schooling in the previous year. In 2019, authorities announced that the Ministry of Education (MoE) would undertake a reform program to educate 1.5 million children who they identified as children deprived of education.
In 2014, the MoE initiated a 12-year reform program to transform the education sector that included training more school teachers, construct school buildings in remote areas, and publish more textbooks.
