A few days ago, I had a chance meeting with a group of schoolteachers. While travelling to a rural village in Manikganj for an entirely different purpose, I happened to enter a local government primary school during the midday meal break.
As I sat in the teachers' lounge chatting with a female teacher, four of her colleagues joined us after finishing their final classes before the break. When I asked whether the school had any teaching positions lying vacant, they replied that all six positions were filled. The headmistress, whom I did not meet, was simply on leave.
I was pleasantly surprised to see a government primary school running so smoothly, with a full complement of teachers and young boys and girls frolicking in the green front yard. Their faces sparkled with the joy of learning. The washrooms, drinking water facilities, and other amenities were clean and well maintained. The sight gave me a wonderful sense of what a near-ideal, state-run village school should look like.
I found myself wishing that the thousands of other public schools -- both primary and secondary -- were operating like this, providing a proper education for the next generation. Unfortunately, that is far from reality.
Around the same time as my visit to Manikganj, I came across several media reports revealing that hundreds of government primary schools across Bangladesh are operating without headteachers, while many others are limping along with half of their teaching positions lying vacant.
Newspapers regularly report that our youngest learners are being deprived of crucial early education because of a severe shortage of classroom teachers.
The learning lost during these formative years can never be fully recovered, no matter how many modern, expensive tertiary institutions we build for higher education later on.
I was deeply shocked to learn that an entire government high school in Lalmonirhat, with several hundred enrolled students, was operating with only a single teacher. How is that even possible?
If media reports are accurate, the remaining teacher, along with district education officials, wrote numerous letters to department heads in Dhaka, desperately requesting replacements -- but to no avail. As teachers retired over the past few years, they were simply never replaced.
Recently, students were forced to leave their classrooms and stage demonstrations, quite literally begging for teaching staff. It is simply unfathomable that in 21st-century, post-revolution Bangladesh, students must protest just to have teachers. Their academic future is in serious jeopardy.
This brings us to a bigger question: Where is the State investing in education, and where is the budget actually going?
Allowing school after school to operate without essential teaching staff, while delivering below-par education to millions of students, is an issue that must be addressed immediately -- before we become too critical of the mushrooming of substandard theological alternatives, particularly privately run madrasas.
Just the other day, I read a newspaper report about guardians in greater Chittagong who, unable to find quality education in local government primary schools, opted to enroll their children in free residential madrasas instead.
Very few people in our society can afford expensive private education, whether in kindergartens, English-medium schools, or international schools.
The overwhelming majority rely on state-run schools as an affordable and reliable option.
If the State cannot deliver quality, accessible education through these public institutions, many poor guardians will have little choice but to turn to madrasas.
This is not to denigrate madrasas as an educational stream. Rather, it raises a critical question: How much quality education can one realistically expect from poorly managed and under-resourced religious schools when the government itself -- despite decades of established systems, standardized administration, and taxpayer funding -- is failing to provide quality education in its own public schools?
How our education budget is spent, and what our priorities actually are, must come under immediate public scrutiny. Schools suffering from severe teacher shortages cannot coexist with an education budget that accounts for such a significant share of national expenditure. That gap must be closed.
In a fiscal year when the government proudly claims to have increased education spending from last year's Tk87,000 crore to more than Tk136,000 crore, how are guardians expected to react to an acute shortage of classroom teachers and basic facilities?
At some point, we must critically examine whether the misplaced priorities of our education authorities have obscured their long-term vision, leaving them blind to the danger looming over the country's public education system.
Reaz Ahmad is Editor, Dhaka Tribune.
