I am perplexed with why Bangladesh is following a path of destroying the merit of the growing children and soon-to-be-leaders of the country. We have embarked on a path that hands GPA 5s to too many students who don’t deserve it. This, in turn, identifies average students as bright students, gives them a right and a claim to be treated among the best students, and an expectation of, and a shot at, the best jobs.
Add various quota systems, and this expectation almost becomes certainty for many young people. Add a little bit of influence, political or otherwise, and when the student graduates with a Bachelor’s or Master’s degree, they are most likely to land the most-coveted jobs, which often results in heartburn for the employers who learn that what they expected is not what they get with the new employee.
The war on the growing brains of children is starting at a very early age. It reminds me of the Chinese opium war, where nearly an entire generation became addicted to opium and were unable to function. Children are curious and eager to learn in the early stages of life. Learning is most beneficial at this stage, when they are taught to articulate their thoughts and ideas, write creatively, develop an interest in reading, draw pictures, sing songs, solve basic math problems, and so on.
Some children would surprise you with their ability to solve truly challenging problems. That ability is probably not being harnessed. Somehow, somewhere, down the road, they are losing interest in reading books, in writing things, in developing cognitive abilities, and in articulating ideas.
This pernicious war on the brains of our growing children is being waged from more than one direction. Clearly, the right things are not happening in a vast majority of schools, and the culprits are really not that hard to identify.
We have poor school teachers. These teachers are very deficient in their academic qualifications. School teachers do not have to be brilliant, they just have to be able to equip the children with the fundamentals, which they should be able to do with just average grades. Children are merely building a foundation at this stage; they do not have to know the intricacies of their subjects. Some bright students are capable of doing that, and there should be programs and mentors to challenge them more, and there should be a system to nurture their capabilities and intelligence.
The failure at this stage is two-fold. First, the teachers come from a system where they just have to prove that they don’t miss out on more than 60% of the potential score. If they can somehow meet the threshold of scoring just 40%, somebody will proclaim that he/she “has the rights and privileges of a graduate,” which gives them a right to teach in schools.
The second is mostly a failure in communication. The teachers are not trained. They are taught in an antiquated system. For example, corporal punishment for students is still very common in Bangladesh.
Whatever failure there is at the school level, it can at least be remedied partly at home. Here it may sound like I am berating the parents. When the children want to spend time with the parents, that is the best time to make up for the deficiencies of our schools, time to stimulate their interest in whatever they are concerned about at that time, to teach them to think about the pros and cons of the positions they are taking, to teach them how to tie loose ends, how to expand a general statement, and how that statement applies to the real things in life.
At this stage, playing a little puzzle with them will establish strong roots and foundations for future learning that may never become available to them again. Unfortunately, while the parents are listening to them, most are not responding to them, because they have their eyes glued on some Hindi soap, probably watching the same episode for the third time.
I know that parents feel tremendous pressure and that they do as much as they can so that their children achieve good results under our system, and that is seen as the ticket to the better institutions for the next level of education. Their sense of obligation turns into the tremendous pressure that they place on children, often resulting in horrible tragedies.
A familial tragedy such as these is a tragedy for the entire nation. We have a nation where the best students on paper are unable to do the most basic things, and they carry this deficiency to their adulthood and their career and, ultimately, to the responsibilities of running the country. Clearly, the parents are misplacing their concern. At school age, it is much more important that students learn the fundamentals that will help them absorb knowledge, a trait that will help them in the future.
The ultimate responsibility lies with the nation’s leaders. Any nation will realise its potential to the fullest if it has a policy of making sure that it identifies its most talented young men and women from every year’s pool of graduates. The affairs of running the country must be bestowed upon them, not those who get shaking knees whenever there is a chart involved or whenever the problem is a little complicated.
When the average civil servant cannot solve a basic problem, they call in consultants, pay them a high price, and then whine about the high price. Then, they just set aside the consultants’ recommendations, saying that the recommendations are not implementable. It should really be the other way round.
The people at the top of the hierarchy managing government affairs should be able to get a decent solution to a problem from their own workers, consisting of the most brilliant people of the country. There will, of course, be a need for consultants every now and then. The simple problems may actually be outsourced. You don’t need to employ the best brains of the country to do the simple things.
Consider our grading system, which is built to encourage mediocrity, to encourage the avoidance of learning the more challenging things, leading to graduation even when the student does not know 60% of the topics he/she is being tested on. Students hunt for “common” questions in the exam, knowing that “not knowing” certain things will not lower their chances of getting good grades or getting a teaching position.
Scoring 80 out of 100 merits a designation of “A” or “A+,” which places a student among a select outstanding group of performers. In all developed countries, a student must score at least 90 on a test to be grouped in that category, students who are clearly way ahead of their peers, and typically will be ranked among the top 5% of the students of the country.
In those countries, students bust their backs to get in the “B+” category for which they need 87+; they work hard to avoid getting placed in the “D” grade group, which is a charity grade earned with a score of just 60 or above. A score of 60 in a typical Bangladesh university following UGC guideline will earn a “B,” which sounds nice, but tells me that the students do not know half of what they are supposed to know.
Some people may get satisfaction at producing graduates who don’t know more than half of what they are supposed to know and may not have any qualms about handing out the jobs of running the affairs of the country to these graduates, but it saddens me and makes me pessimistic about the prospect of the country.
Just a little push will encourage the students to put more effort into their studies, and I don’t see how that can harm the country. Why is there not a better alternative to handing out jobs to slackers who did not even want to take advantage of the “nearly free” higher education handed out to them by the tax-payers?