A recent news post, headlined “2300 Year Old Aristotle School Discovered in Greece,” drew fresh attention to the ancient educational complex at Mieza in northern Greece, where Aristotle taught the young Alexander the Great. Archaeological research has actually been continuing there for years, with renewed excavations since 2024 revealing lecture spaces, stone benches, a palaestra, a stadium, long covered walkways, banquet halls, mosaics, coins and even writing styluses.

The latest findings have strengthened the scholarly association of the fourth century BC Royal Gymnasium with the education of Alexander and other Macedonian youths under Aristotle. More than two millennia later, the remains still remind us of something simple but powerful: societies are often remembered not merely by the buildings they constructed, but by the places where they chose to educate their children.

Clean classrooms, functioning toilets, safe drinking water, boundary walls, electricity, furniture and a maintained environment are not cosmetic additions to education.

Clean classrooms, functioning toilets, safe drinking water, boundary walls, electricity, furniture and a maintained environment are not cosmetic additions to education.

That ancient story provides an unusual but meaningful lens through which to view what is happening in Sindh today. No one is suggesting a direct comparison between Aristotle’s school and an ordinary government school in a village of Dadu, Thatta, Umerkot or Naushahro Feroze. Yet the underlying principle is universal. A classroom built today can outlive the government that built it, the officer who approved it and even the generation that first studied inside it. This is why the reconstruction, rehabilitation and renovation of government schools across Sindh deserves to be judged not simply as civil works, but as an investment in the province’s social memory and future.

The scale of the challenge Sindh inherited after the catastrophic floods of 2022 was enormous. Official figures presented to the Sindh government in March 2026 showed that 19,808 schools had been damaged, of which 7,503 had earlier been classified as requiring complete reconstruction. By March this year, 6000 plus damaged schools had been taken up under different reconstruction and rehabilitation programmes, while 2,114 schools had been completed through various funding arrangements. The figures represent substantial activity, but they also demonstrate the size of the unfinished task: at that point, 13000 damaged schools had still not been brought into the restoration programme. But the Sindh government is committed to carry on these unfinished ones on the........

© Daily Times