In March this year, an article, “Social cohesion through education” was published in the quarterly magazine White Board. Written by Education Minister Dr Dipu Moni and Professor Samia Huq, Dean of Education at BRAC University, it highlighted the need to “comprehensively reform [the] education system to foster shared prosperity among all citizens.” The article stated that reform of textbooks within the national curriculum began in 2019 and that significant reforms and improvements need to be made in the field of teacher training.
The improvements and reforms referred to above will take some years to work through, and there is a great deal of work to be done right now. The education of the children of the country has been very badly neglected over the last two years. Officials blame “Covid-19” and now there are reports that they are blaming climate change that children are dropping out of school.
In an article published recently by the Thomson Reuters Foundation, UNICEF officials are quoted as saying: “Droughts, floods, and river erosion across the region (South Asia) have left millions of children homeless, hungry, lacking health care and safe water – and in many cases out of school.” Erosion of land in coastal areas most certainly can be linked to climate change. However, it should be pointed out that homes and schools in Bangladesh have been lost to river bank erosion for many, many years.
During the many long months when schools were closed, how many of these schools were repaired and updated as far as toilet and sanitation facilities are concerned?
Why did the Ministry of Education not ensure that, where possible, schools could continue imparting education in the shade of trees, in open areas?
Local bodies such as union parishads or even groups of parents would have helped this informal way of education. Why was no one in the Ministry of Education at national, district, or upazila level thinking “out of the box?”
According to a Unicef and Unesco report of October 2021, 37 million children in Bangladesh have seen their education disrupted by school closures since the beginning of the pandemic of Covid-19. In addition, Bangladesh’s Annual Primary School Census for 2021 showed 10.24 million students attending 65,000 government primary schools -- but noted that the drop-out rate in 2021 was over 17%, with over 2 million children leaving classes.
The director general of the Directorate of Primary Education is reported as saying that the drop-out rate was “alarming” and added that “last year we observed that more than 500 schools were damaged by flooding. The students could not go to school for a long time.”
This statement does not, in fact, make sense. The students could not go back to school because the schools had been closed by the government, not because of climate change. What became evident, the director general of the Directorate of Primary Education said, is that “a large number of them never come back to school and are involved in different work to support their family.” In addition, it is widely reported that there has been an alarming increase in child marriages.
An ILO project coordinator, in a recent interview, said that “I was surprised to see many girls younger than 10 years old working in a factory near Keraniganj, where women’s dresses are produced.” Clearly, different ministries need to work together in a careful and sensible way in order to handle this situation.
There is no doubt that keeping schools closed for so long has caused enormous damage across the board. From the early days of the pandemic it was clear that Covid-19 rarely made children very ill and an American study in 2021 pointed out that the chances of a child between five and 14 catching and dying from the virus was about one in 500,000 -- roughly a tenth of a child’s chance of dying in a traffic accident in normal times.
That is why, in most countries, the call for schools was that they should be “the last to close and the first to open.”
The planned education reforms mentioned at the beginning of this article are indeed very important but work needs to be put on a more urgent footing now to try to right the wrongs of the last two years.
Finally, and in addition, with the work related to the reforms and the urgent work that is needed immediately, the needs and rights of children with disabilities must be addressed and protected. Children with disabilities have been severely or completely neglected over the last two years as far as education is concerned.
Julian Francis has been associated with relief and development activities of Bangladesh since the War of Liberation. In 2012, the Government of Bangladesh awarded him the ‘Friends of Liberation War Honour’ in recognition of his work among the refugees in India in 1971 and in 2018 honoured him with full Bangladesh citizenship.
