Let us be brutally frank. Education, at all levels, is on a slide in the country. The latest manifestation of student misdemeanour at Jahangirnagar University is but a continuation of the embarrassment which has been coming our way for years. Jahangirnagar University has by now established a reputation for being an unsafe place for visitors as also for its female student component, thanks to the black sheep on its campus.
But, then again, while other higher institutions of learning may not have come by a similar unsavoury reputation, that is not to say that education is in good shape everywhere or anywhere in Bangladesh. Let us go back to the Jahangirnagar students in question. What sort of audacity is it when some young men, supposed to be gaining academic enlightenment, pounce on women and rape them even as their friends keep their husbands pinioned to helplessness somewhere else? Or does the fact that these rapists happen to be associated with the Chhatra League gives them the immunity as well as impunity that allows them to commit such misdeeds and expects them to get away with their acts?
It is not enough for their organizations, in this case the Chhatra League, to inform citizens that these rapists have been expelled. Expulsions are no substitute for justice, for punishment of criminality. Of course, the rapists have been taken into custody and have been placed on police remand. What happens after that? Looking back at similar acts of outrage earlier by the young, what sort of justice was done in the case of those who set a precedent through seizing helpless women and subjecting them to shame? We have been informed that an inquiry committee will investigate the incident. Frankly, when the crime has been exposed before an entire nation, of what worth is an inquiry committee?
The Jahangirnagar University scandal is but one more instance of how higher education has become hostage to shameless, criminally-minded young men unleashed on our society. It is also a reflection of the ways in which academia is today imperilled not only by such unruly students happy to be linked to the ruling party but also by teachers who have in the recent past made little or no attempt not to flaunt their partisan politics in public.
Educational grievances
Every citizen has a right to a political opinion, but every citizen must also remember that such personal opinions, once they are brought into the professional domain, vitiate the space in which they are being expressed. When vice chancellors get carried away by political emotions, to a point where they publicly voice their sentiments against political parties they do not agree with, they only strip away at the sanctity of universities. It is not the job of vice chancellors to dabble in politics.
For years we have heard of the grievance about our universities not coming by places on a global or regional ranking of higher educational institutions. When research is at a low output, when politicization becomes the theme of elections to teachers’ unions, when intellectualism is on a decline, when appointments at universities are dependent on political lobbying or patronage, we should not be expecting the world to honour us with its respect. What matters in the classroom is scholarly teaching, which again is a prerogative of one who is dedicated to the ideals of teaching.
Where has that idealism gone? When a vice chancellor facing student protests terms the retaliatory acts of her fans at the university as a mass uprising in her defence, it is shame which has us lower our heads.
Universities apart, there is the matter of what quality of teaching we are imparting to those studying in schools. The scandal which has lately engulfed the National Curriculum and Textbook Board brings home to us the disturbing reality of how education has been dwindling to near irrelevance in the country. Errors in the textbooks handed out to students at the beginning of the year have been detected again. When last year mistakes were spotted in the textbooks, it was the expectation that lessons had been learnt and that such errors would not recur. But that has been the story again this year. How did that come to be?
The NCTB has a writers’ panel responsible for preparing the chapters and the stories that will go into the textbooks. A question here relates to the manner in which the writers are selected by the NCTB. What degree of transparency is there in the selection process? Again, there are editors whose job is to scrutinize all the entries in the textbooks, approve them or suggest corrections before they pass into the hands of students. To what extent were the editors responsible for the bloopers which were spotted in the textbooks this year? Some of those involved with the preparation of the textbooks have come forth with the untenable explanation that the editors were too busy or the time was too little for the materials in the books to be gone through.
A parlous state
Seriously, are we as citizens expected to accept such explanations and then imagine that nothing serious has happened and so we can move on with our quotidian lives? The point here is simple and unavoidable: From school to university, education in Bangladesh is in a parlous state. Over the years, education has been subjected to experiments, with terrible consequences. Students score GPAs and Golden GPAs and celebrate their achievements with their teachers and their guardians. But have these GPAs been giving the nation’s young the grounding which for earlier generations of students was a pillar of strength, based as it was on traditional methods of divisions and classes obtained at examinations?
When in the recent past the young armed with Golden GPAs were unable to claim places at public universities, ministers were irate at what they considered to be too rigorous a procedure for admission to the universities. They ought to do better than being indignant with the universities. They need to reflect on why students with such brilliant scores in GPA are nowhere near those who sat for examinations in the decades before the entire system was binned in the interest of ‘modern’ education.
When education collapses, when teaching is disappointing, when constant experimentation mars the performance of pupils, when universities turn into a playground of students in whom sexual criminality takes over, it is the nation which pays a terrible price. All too often we celebrate the achievements of Bangladesh’s students who earn plaudits through their performance abroad. But we carefully ignore the fact that these young people have earned those honours at the foreign institutions they are associated with, not here at home.
Our heads are not held high, our national self-esteem slips disastrously, when student politics throws up images of student leaders travelling in expensive vehicles, owning flats, engaging in tender-related business and visiting their villages through helicopter journeys, when women are threatened with molestation and when young people serious about progressing in their studies are faced with the wrath of the politically linked men abusing the call of education.
These young men who have raped a woman at Jahangirnagar University have put us all to shame again. For the government, hardly over a month into its new term, the episode should be a warning sign -- that if such an incident so early on can damage its image, that if it is allowed to be papered over, there will be trouble ahead. Partisanship is not what we expect in a handling of the circumstances that have arisen.
It is governance, that necessary instrument of ensuring public welfare, which will reassure every citizen that there will be no recurrence of such criminality in the times ahead. Let that be the theme for the authorities to work on.
Syed Badrul Ahsan is Consultant Editor, Dhaka Tribune.
