Now that the political situation seems to have calmed down, at least in Dhaka, another topic of conversation consumes my middle class friends’ minds: How are we to educate our children?
This is a very real and appropriate concern that all parents have to face. We all want our children to succeed and there’s a widely held belief, justified in my view, that education is the key to our children’s future. In an emerging country like Bangladesh this is especially true, but what I’m hearing is that parents are confronted by a situation fraught with a multitude of pitfalls, and if you make the wrong decision, things look pretty bleak.
What are the pitfalls? From what I understand, they fall into four broad categories. Do we send our children to state schools or private schools? Do we have them educated in Bangla or English languages? Do we have them educated overseas if we can afford it? And finally, where should they go to university; possibly Dhaka University, or North South, or overseas? On the surface, you could almost argue that Dhakaiites are spoilt for choice, but such a view disguises a serious and deep-seated problem.
The recent budget announced that education funding would increase by 12%, which in some respects seems generous until you start to think about the magnitude of the problems to be addressed.
At this point I should disclose that I have been involved in education at some level or the other all of my adult working life. I have actually taught from kindergarten to postgraduate level, supervising a number of PhDs. All of which has led me to conclude that teaching is not an easy job. In fact it is a very difficult job that requires patience, tact, commitment, a love of learning, and a desire to engage with young minds. I say this in case what follows may be construed as harsh.
Over the past two years I have been collecting articles from the English language press in Bangladesh dealing with educational issues. On the basis of this, I think it fair to say we are dealing with a system in crisis, despite the promise of a 12% increase in expenditure.
What are the principle features of this crisis? Too many and too endemic to deal with in detail here, so some examples to illustrate why I regard it as a system in crisis and why choosing the right education for their children is such an important issue for Bangladeshis.
In the public primary sector, we have a situation where the schools are in decay and the teachers poorly qualified, a situation that is replicated in the secondary sector. At the university level, bashing the private universities seems to be a national sport if the press is anything to go by, while Dhaka University is held up as some beacon of learning.
I have no doubt that all Bangladeshis want a good, successful learning system that provides all children with a sound education, even in the remotest area. How can this be achieved?
There is one simple solution: Throw money at education. I am often asked why countries like Malaysia, Indonesia, Singapore, not to mention China and India, seemingly have better educational results than Bangladesh. By better results I mean ranking in the innumerable testing results in educational fundamentals like math, spelling, reading, and so on. This is not a Eurocentric worldview; South Korea, Taiwan, Japan, and China consistently outscore the Western developed countries in these tests, much to the consternation of the British, the Americans, and the Australians. And when it comes to university rankings, Dhaka doesn’t even rate in the top 2,000, while Korean, Japanese, and Singaporean universities rank in the top 100.
Why is there this disparity? In each of the Asian countries cited, there has been a concerted and systematic effort to improve educational standards. This has been achieved by spending money in targeted areas, the training of teachers to international standards with teaching becoming a respected and remunerated occupation; the provision of excellent schools with modern facilities and laboratories; curriculum reform, and a move away from rote learning and so on.
From my conversations with friends and colleagues, I detect a strong desire to emulate the successes of Asian countries and a concomitant sense of frustration at ever being able to achieve success.
At the moment, English medium schools are under a cloud largely because linguistic nationalists object to the language of the imperialists having primacy in education. Fair enough. But when you survey employers about their expectations of graduates, they all demand a degree of proficiency in English so that business can be conducted efficiently. So let’s not emasculate English medium schools, and ensure Bangladesh’s ambitions of becoming a middle-income country in the near future. This is not to decry the significance of Bangla as a language, rather it’s an acknowledgement of English as the commercial “lingua franca” of the day. Moreover, the call to reform education applies equally to the Bangla medium schools as it does to English. Both systems need reform.
Finally, the university sector is also in need of urgent reform. Dhaka University was once called, correctly, the “Oxford the East,” and I have been asked what has gone wrong. I can’t answer that question, but I can observe that as long as significant sections of the faculty see partisan politics as being more important than scholarship, and student politics becomes even uglier, then DU will find it almost impossible to regain its status in the community of learning.
The second dimension of the university to raise concerns is the role of the University Grants Commission. As I understand it, its role is to oversee all universities but the public ones simply ignore its remit, which means the UGC becomes de facto, the supervisor of the private sector.
The private university situation deserves a dedicated article in its own right, suffice to say, there are problems in the sector but there is a tendency to tar all private universities with the same brush. There are badly run and organised private universities and they need to be reformed or cease to operate, but the better ones outrank Dhaka University in objective world ranking systems.
Moreover, people forget that the private sector was developed to meet the unmet demands of the secondary system producing too many HSC graduates for the limited number of public university seats. Rather than denigrate the private sector, for what appear to be largely ideological reasons, it should be encouraged to do better.
If my account is accurate, it is easy to find solutions to the parlous state of education in Bangladesh, as my friends describe and is confirmed by press reports. More money has to be spent, teachers better trained, the curriculum reformed to reflect modern pedagogic developments, and diversity and creativity encouraged. In short, target and improve the public sector and allow it to compete with the private sector without harassment or undue interference.
