February 2022 is upon us. March 2022 will see two years that global shutdowns were declared as a result of the Covid-19 pandemic. Much has changed over the past two years. That much is obvious.
Unfortunately, much has also remained the same.
Covid numbers are spiking in Bangladesh once again. Deaths are in the 30s once again. Lives and livelihoods are threatened once again. The government, we are told, is having to make tough decisions, once again.
But most of all, once again, our students are no longer in their classrooms. They are back home.
It was only back in September that schools reopened, after 18 months of closure -- certainly among the longest school closures in the world as a result of the pandemic. It always perplexed me; other countries seemed to keep everything else shut but attempted to keep schools open.
We did the exact opposite.
Maybe I wasn’t understanding something here. Of course I wasn’t understanding something here. There had to be a logical explanation why Bangladesh was completely going against what the rest of the world was doing, right?
Where are we heading?
I do believe that the worst of the pandemic is behind us. As a fairly optimistic individual, I saw 2022 as a year for change. Bangladesh recently celebrated 50 years of liberation. 2022 was supposed to begin with renewed vigour in every sense of the word. The second half of 2021 schools reopened again, Covid numbers were negligible, and we even managed to win a Test match in New Zealand! Let the good times roll, or so we thought.
Instead, we appear to be back where we were throughout much of 2020 and the first half of 2021. A worrying number of infections. People arguing over social distancing and mask-wearing once again. Offices considering work from home again, and many implementing them.
And of course, the students back home.
It is true that we have learned from the pandemic. We have learned a lot. During the first wave of the Covid-19 pandemic, we tried the whole digital means of delivering education. The entire education system, just about fully analog, became fully 100% digital. It was ambitious and it was necessary at the time. The authorities do indeed deserve credit for this.
That is the system that we relied on throughout the pandemic. It is the system we are back to once again. Online education. The future of education. Or is it?
Who really is learning?
How effective has this system been? Amidst all this noise regarding online education, how successful has it really been? How much have our students learned? Have they learned at all?
I know one of the things that has happened for sure. Some students simply got off the hook. And it made sense that they did; teachers had too much on their plate. With the need to take online classes and adapt to this digital means of delivering education, they simply couldn’t check who it was that was doing the work, if the students were really doing the work.
To expect that from the teachers was not realistic to begin with.
And can we blame the students? Bangladeshi parents care about grades. Unfortunately, Bangladeshi parents have always, always cared about grades, first and foremost. Learning? What’s that? What is this entity called learning? What is this strange phenomenon of not studying for grades?
You figure the rest out.
Some of us realized that we could not reach all students through the internet. Again, congratulations for that. Students in rural regions, the most vulnerable, simply did not have the means to access high speed internet at all times.
What did we do? We moved to delivering education content through TV. We innovated. We aired a bunch of lessons on TV. We reached more students.
A roaring success, right? Not so fast.
Again, credit where credit is due -- the thinking is correct and executed with the best intentions. We can’t really fault that here. However, once again, the same series of questions: How successful have these innovations really been? How much have our students learned? Have they learned at all?
Quality education?
If you’re a parent or a student or even a teacher reading this, ask yourself this question: Are you happy with Bangladesh’s education? Even before the pandemic, were you? How about being proud … are you proud of Bangladesh’s education system?
While it is true that we have made strides in increasing our literacy rates, increasing enrollment in primary education, and in particular, educating more girls, that only tells part of the story. And of course, that’s the part that sees the headlines, the coverage in the media. It’s the part we want to talk about.
The other part of the story involves the quality of our education, the part no one really talks about because no one wants to talk about it. Even before the pandemic, Bangladesh may have been doing well on the quantity side of things, with a steady increase in numerous metrics, but as far as quality of education goes, we have been languishing behind our neighbours. Pretty much all of our neighbours.
And is that a surprise? We spend less than 2% of our GDP on education. That is a frightfully low number and the lowest in our region. We also rank dead last in research and development in the region. It appears the more students climb up the grades, the worse the quality of education becomes. And research and development is painstaking work. Funding them is arduous. No one wants to do that. Boring!
Funny though, how we keep harping about how important education is, and yet, we sure don’t want to be doing much to fix it. Yet, blaming authorities is the easy way out; as University Grants Commission (UGC) reports tell us every year, almost the entire allocated amount by the government for research every year remains practically unspent.
But that too makes sense. We don’t spend on research because we don’t know how to. There’s been minimal urgency in creating that culture, that environment at universities. There’s bottlenecks and red tape and all the fun stuff. There’s also little in the way of appreciation. Teachers would much rather go abroad for any research. I can’t really blame them.
We’re rightfully proud that girls in Bangladesh do wonderfully in primary and secondary schooling. Then, at tertiary levels, there’s a significant drop; while the ratio is pretty much identical at earlier stages of education, at the tertiary level, it drops to 0.72 females for every male enrolled. That particular stat is pre-pandemic, and if the increase in child marriage is anything to go by, I am willing to bet money that that ratio has only gotten worse.
This is just the tip of the iceberg. An iceberg that only grew in size during the pandemic, as students remained home.
It does not have to be this way. As the old cliche goes, education is the backbone of a nation. For Bangladesh, looking to capitalize on its demographic dividend over the next decade or two, it may as well be the entire central nervous system.
Without harnessing the power of the youth, without educating them as per the needs of this century, and equipping them with the appropriate skills, we will never be able to hit all of our targets as a nation, chief of which is becoming an innovative and developed economy, that is also equitable, by 2041.
For now, I have a simple question: How is a country that spends only 2% of its GDP on education, which never has any universities in any global rankings, or fails to allocate, let alone then spend, on research and development, expected to become a model for innovation, equity, and development in the next 20 years?
Maybe I’m not understanding something here.
AHM Mustafizur Rahman is Joint Editor, Editorial & Op-Ed, Dhaka Tribune.
