Growing troubles

The first time I came across the word escalation was several years ago, in a book about military strategy. Since then, I have seen the word used in several other contexts. The core meaning, however, has remained the same. Escalation is defined as a gradual and steady rise in the intensity of something. Escalation can be seen in action in several, very different, aspects of life, from the crime rate of a city to the amount of medication someone needs to be given. Imagine, for instance, that a city's crime rate is at a given level. The ordinary citizens, and to some extent even the law enforcement agencies, seem to have come to terms with the state of things. Under such circumstances, it is almost guaranteed that there will soon be a rise in the frequency and nature of the crimes being committed. The intuition is simple – the more criminals can get away with, the more they feel the urge to reach for greater heights, take greater risks and go for the correspondingly higher returns. This is the very essence of escalation.

To be fair, escalation has many positive associations as well. Anyone who has trained for a marathon has used the principle of escalation to gradually increase the workout intensity. Any good instructor will make the students tackle progressively harder problems, moving on to more difficult ones whenever students are comfortable with the current difficulty level. Like almost everything else in life, the problem is not with the concept of escalation, it is in the application.

Let me mention a few ways in which escalation has been a problem for Bangladesh. The law and order situation in Bangladesh has always left a lot to be desired for. Even twenty years ago, people felt that the streets are not safe and that nothing was being about this problem. Today, people still have the same complaints. However, the nature and frequency of the dangers seem to have gone up several orders of magnitude. Even a decade ago, news of a homicide would dominate newspaper headlines for at least a fortnight. The incident would be the talk of the town, and the police would be able to focus on little else. Today, I doubt that plain old homicide would even make it to the front page. Now to be newsworthy it has to be multiple homicides, brutal torture, even the occasional corpse mutilation. And even then most people will see these reports, and then casually flip channels to watch sports or soap opera. Whether we admit it or not, in a sense we have come to terms with such brutality. We can coexist with it, pretend to even not notice it, until it comes and affects us or our own. And as we slowly adapt to the current state of things, there will surely be escalation to the next level of horror. It is only a question of when.

Crime is not the only domain where escalation takes place. All forms of corruption and injustice are susceptible to escalation. In Bangladesh, corruption has always been a problem, but over time things have kept getting worse. What would be considered terrible a decade ago, has today been accepted as commonplace. We no longer feel surprised when someone asks for a bribe; we only care about the amount. Perhaps in one more decade, we will no longer care about the amount either.

However, bribery is not the only form of corruption. In fact, the most insidious types of corruption are probably the ones that involve a decay of mentalities and principles. Unfortunately, even this variety of corruption seems rampant in Bangladesh today. I do not claim that my perspective is correct, but it seems to me that a lot of this decay has to do with how things kept escalating and we chose to ignore them. Being involved in an academic profession, I would like to emphasize only on that side of the issue.

If you talk to a few people involved with teaching and education, you will soon find that the vast majority of them seem to agree that the standard of students, and education, has fallen substantially since their time. While such "back in our days" statements should be taken with a pinch of salt, it seems unlikely that so many people feel this way without there being at least a semblance of truth to it. Further, there is some degree of evidence that today's students really are not doing as well as their predecessors used to. Instead of focusing on such vague allegations though, let me just mention a few concrete observations that I myself have made.

First of all, students are supposed to want to excel in studies. They are supposed to have a drive to do better in exams and get better grades. However, it seems that these days students want shortcuts to such achievements. The better ones look for shortcuts by trying to find question patterns, or expecting the teachers to tell them which sections they should study in order to be sure that there will be "common" questions. Then there are the ones who look for more deplorable shortcuts, like resorting to plagiarism. Earlier this year, when the HSC examination questions kept getting leaked out, no small number of students went to great lengths to get a hold of these questions. What is worse, once they had obtained said questions, a lot of them still were not able to answer it themselves! Instead, they had to look for private tutors who would be willing to solve the questions for them to memorize and regurgitate in the exam. Not only are these students dishonest enough to seek out leaked question papers, they are so incompetent that once they have it, they need someone else to answer it for them! What can we expect from these people when they enter universities, and eventually one day the nation's workforce?

As if this was not bad enough, something more disturbing came to my attention. A few conscientious university students started an online campaign, urging the HSC candidates to not engage in collecting leaked questions, and to stop others from doing the same. They were also requesting their peers to not help any HSC candidates with solving these questions. In one such forum, a few HSC candidates began a backlash against these people, saying that they have no business messing with whatever is happening with the HSC exams. One of them even went as far as to defend the leaking of questions, claiming that exams are much harder than they used to be in the past, and it is only fair for the students to have the questions way ahead of time so that they get time to think about them.

And this is what I mean when I try to tie these events in with the idea of escalation. Students have always desired shortcuts, always wanted to succeed easily. It is human nature to want to avoid hardship, to look for guaranteed outcomes. However, when the future leaders and builders of a nation not only engage in corruption, but also begin to defend it as their right, then we really are lost. I do not claim that we grew up in a generation of holy men who never tried to cheat. But when we were caught, we were ashamed. We were even ostracized by peers. And the last thing on our minds was to defend our actions, to claim that we are entitled to it. No one is ever entitled to crime, and let us not fool ourselves, for this is nothing but a crime.

The only way out of escalation, the only way to ensure that things do not keep falling apart and decades later questions being leaked does not become the norm, is to protest here and now. The way is to keep reminding all concerned that such incidents should not happen next year, or any year afterwards. At the very least, we need to make sure that the people concerned at least admit that this is a problem, a very serious one. That they can no longer blow this off as "some mistakes". All of us need to take some action today, even if it is only to remind our siblings and children that cheating is never OK. That no matter how hard things get, they should never feel entitled to doing the wrong thing, or try to defend any wrong actions they may have taken. For if we do not spread this message now, if we do not take these steps now, our future generations will go through things far worse than we can even imagine today. That is the very nature of escalation.

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Hammad Ali is a senior lecturer of Computer Science and Engineering at BRAC University.