An education commission, chosen with care, can advise the interim government and serve the nation by identifying key areas that need reforms.
A ban on campus politics seems to be an easy answer. But what does it mean and how will it work?
The interim government has to decide guidelines for the minimum reform targets to achieve, and where to begin.
Students should have the right to have a role in managing the education and co-curricular activities of their institutions
If the ruling party leaders don’t understand or pretend not to understand why students are not staying back at home (their campuses and dormitories remain shuttered), we are in much deeper trouble than one could imagine
The cloud of dystopia thickens as public perception connects the dotted line between pervasive corruption, greed, inefficiency and ineptitude.
We cannot continue to keep primary and secondary education in discrete boxes and try to plan and manage these separately.
The new budget can be described as a “crisis response”
It was reported in the press that a teacher who topped the list in the primary school teachers’ recruitment examination 12 years ago did not get the job.
Is there a good reason why the school year should begin in the first month of the Christian calendar other than that this is how it was done in the colonial era? In India, school calendar is a state (provincial) matter, but the year mostly begins in June.
Mark Twain reputedly said that God created wars to teach Americans geography. It can be said that God put Donald Trump in the White House to teach America how to protect democracy.
Does Bangladesh education need salvaging? The official narrative is equivocal. Most young children are in primary school. The system has expanded to comprise 40 million students, over 200,000 institutions, and over a million teachers. Girls and boys are equally enrolled in schools, a feat not achieved by many developing countries. We do need to work more on improving quality. So why is the despair?
The end of the pandemic is not quite in sight. Schools have remained closed for a full six months now since March 17.
The decision to recommend by concerned ministries to the government to scrap primary level PEC and junior secondary level JSC exams as reported in the press is welcome news (Daily Star, August 12, 2020).
On June 14, the ministry of education extended school closure, imposed on March 18 due to the Covid-19 pandemic, to August 6. Earlier, the prime minister had said the closure may continue to September.
It is disappointment again for the advocates of education who have been pleading for stronger public commitment to education. The new budget maintains Bangladesh’s record for having one of the lowest allocations in South Asia and among developing countries for education as share of GDP and of the national budget. Moreover, there is no sign of an education rescue and recovery plan to offset the impact of the pandemic.
We have to talk about the post-corona time, even though Bangladesh has not reached the peak in infection and deaths caused by the pandemic.
Four million students of tertiary education in Bangladesh—in over 5,000 institutions including public and private universities, affiliated colleges, and professional institutions—are in shutdown, which will continue until September if the situation does not improve.
