A matter of concern is exposed to us once our foreign friends express concern over it. “We introduce a son of our soil as admirable when she or he is internationally reputed, not when she or he is respected at home for his or her calibre and attainments,” said Professor Anisur Rahman, an economist who dumped his profession many years ago. Maybe we just cannot visualise our problems and prospects.
Even a silent killer easily evades our eyes until or unless someone from outside points a finger at it. After the Economist Intelligence Unit had painted a grim picture of our higher education vis-à-vis employment, many of us kept attention largely away from the harsh reality that the quality of education is declining alarmingly.
However, a number of development thinkers shared their concerns in public earlier. Professor Wahiduddin Mahmud is one of them. He said that a low level of skills and technology would not help us to take our development to the next stage. We also reckon foreigners to be wrong when their observations affect our comfort zone in power politics.
Who dares to say the quality of education is poor when our education minister, Nurul Islam Nahid, has been so successful in helping textbooks reach the doorsteps of students? His government has finished its job of making books available. Let’s forget the importance of learning.
Hundreds of thousands of students are showing great results in public examinations and getting enrolled in universities. So who am I to question the product of the academic system nurtured by Mr Nahid and company?
I experienced at least one thing during an assignment to share my knowledge of journalism with some university students. I asked them to express their thoughts about the social context of journalism in their own language, without using the so-called high thoughts. In the classroom of digital laboratory, one of them used the jargon – thanks to Google. When I asked him to explain it, he could not say the meaning of the word. I asked another undergraduate to name all the five oceans. He could recollect only one – the Atlantic.
The EIU report titled “High university enrolment, low graduate employment” tended to mean that our higher education does not teach us how to think independently and meet job market requirements. And our secondary education produces a huge number of university admission seekers, mostly devoid of basic knowledge, who do not gain much knowledge from higher education. Thus almost 50% (47% to be specific) of the Bangladeshi graduates remain unemployed.
Since there is no yardstick to measure the quality of education, nobody challenges the sub-standard education. Behind it, there is a nexus of organisers and owners, managing committees, a section of teachers and guardians, political elements, and regulators. Only the graduates face the acid test when they join the competition in the job market where they, in most cases, cannot fit in.
Of course, the opposite story is there as well. We have witnessed over the years that many qualified boys and girls face difficulties while trying to secure jobs. None but the ones in the ruling party camp, backed by bureaucracy, would claim that our public sector recruitment process is fair and transparent.
The private sector, which is yet to develop a good system of hiring people, does not “care about what education the candidate has received” so that graduates won’t need to be paid highly. The burden of the massive number of certificate-holders is the result of a faulty education system which is only doing a disservice to our meritorious youths. The trend is even worse than brain-drain – we are just destroying talent.
It seems to be a paradox that you need quality manpower while competent people face a dearth of job opportunities. We are also not focused on other purposes of education – humility, self-denial, creativity, wisdom, and so on. But it’s fair that when you do not respect the learned people, you are not be blessed with great men.
Some of the enlightened people too may have been driven by a sense of withdrawal from the society. Some others – be the ruling elite or advisers to rulers – have taken an opportunist’s stance. They are serious about quality education, but only for their children. But we fail to realise that Nero will not have a second chance of playing his flute if the fire engulfs the entire city.
By this time, erosion has started to spill over across the society from the cities to the villages. I don’t know where a mere number – which experts call demographic dividend – would take us. I fear we may be missing many opportunities and losing out in future competitions. No bankrupt nation can prosper as quality cannot be achieved overnight with political rhetoric.
A Bangladeshi diplomat cited an example of a third world country where he served as ambassador. One of the members of a developed country’s delegation there was sympathetic on seeing the intellectual bankruptcy of the leaders and officials of the host nation. “We will propose this during the meeting to sell the project but you should reject it because it would be harmful for your country,” the diplomat quoted the team member as saying. We can only hope that outsiders will not be our lone saviours.
