St Paul's Urdu High School

St Paul's Urdu High School
Address
Iqbal Shaheed Road Karachi Pakistan
Information
Type	Private high school
Religious affiliation(s)	Roman Catholic
Administration	Catholic Board of Education
Gender	Boys
Age	4 to 16
Affiliation	Board of Secondary Education, Karachi

St Paul's Urdu High School is a Catholic boys school located on Iqbal Shaheed Road, Karachi, Sindh, Pakistan. The medium of instruction is the Urdu language i.e. the entire curriculum is taught in Urdu except for the subjects English and Sindhi language.

History

Fr Egidio Trindade was the first principal of the school.

Fifty-four Christian schools and colleges were nationalized in 1972 by the late Prime Minister Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto. In 1987 a government directive gave provincial governments the freedom to denationalize schools. After nationalization, academic standards dropped, discipline hardly existed and the schools’ infrastructure deteriorated.

St Paul's Urdu High School shares the campus with St Paul's English High School.

Denationalization

The Sindh government denationalized 21 educational institutions on January 1, 1990 including Saint Paul's. In 1990 Cardinal Joseph Cordeiro of Karachi appealed to the archdiocese's Catholic community to help rebuild a school recently returned to the Church after 17 years of government ownership. The Cardinal invited parishes to help raise Saint Paul's Urdu School “like a phoenix from the ashes” of nationalization. The most difficult part of reconstruction, was “to re-instill Christian values of life and education in the pupils and staff,” requiring the cooperation of “the whole diocese.”