Paying the price for low quality education

Nurul Islam Nahid's management of school education is remarkable. In a cabinet of faceless and occasionally nameless ministers, he is one of the few recognized by the aam janata. He deals with the most sensitive topic of them all, education of children. So every family with school-going children knows his name. However, families who do send their children to school are not always happy. It's known more for poor quality education, bad exam systems and the glamorizing of high school education results in isolation by the GPA and Golden GPA, etc. Unhappiness with educational underperformance is not just about an inefficient system. Its impact is more serious. It is damaging the base of the socio-economic class that usually holds the professional world together.

The decline in education has been noted many a time, but efforts to improve are not there because the real demand on the minister is to pass a high percentage of students, not deliver quality education. Thus Nahid is more concerned about quantity, not quality. So we have a huge number of students passing out but who are less enabled than the students of previous years.

The problem lies squarely in low quality, and the causes for that are many. But one with which everyone agrees is the low quality of teachers who are unable to carry out national education plans. Over 40% of our high schools can't prepare creative questions and 55 per cent of teachers of primary schools do not understand critical education methods. About half of the teachers rely on guidebooks and more than 92 per cent of students in consequence use them to understand their lessons.

If teachers don't understand the lessons, is it fair to expect students to? The students of today are becoming tomorrow's teachers and so the rot runs very deep.

There are nearly 40,000 primary schools with nearly 11 million children between 6 to 10 years. But many of these schools do not have headmasters. "The minimum international standard for teacher- student ratio is 30: 1 but in Bangladesh there is one teacher per around 50 students."

An internal report of the Directorate of Primary Education (DPE) of 2015 states that around 70 percent of children are unable to read or write properly. They also can't do basic mathematical calculations even after five years of primary school education.

The World Bank, in its report titled, "Bangladesh Education Sector Review", also says that the quality and methodology of teaching is dismal. Most teachers are against innovation as they fear it may result in poor performances in examinations, hence threaten their jobs. So what matters is the passing rate.

The higher secondary curriculum is based on outdated syllabi. Research shows that, after SSC and HSC, 35 to 40 percent of the students in our country have no scope of enrolling themselves in colleges or universities. Several reports say that no more than 20% of GPA 5 students are eligible for admission into Dhaka University.

Obviously this is hurting the middle class most as it is unable to gain the professional skills necessary to enter and effectively compete in the job market. Thus socio-economic class mobility is severely restricted and the young in the middle class are being condemned to remain as an underclass. This level of class confinement is akin to economic apartheid since the best way to ensure entry restriction is low education standard. The system is therefore unable to be a tool of more pluralist socio-economic class construction.

If the local professional class is very weak, the demand for such services cannot be fulfilled by local graduates and this is where 'apartheid' finds a concrete outcome — increased hiring of foreigners and NRBs. Most university teachers are aware that high school student education standards are falling and few qualify to become teachers in the same institution. On the other hand, many private universities in particular are keen to hire foreign educated Bangladeshis because the brand value of locally educated ones is very low. Thus, students who can afford education outside, that is, the well off class, go abroad and return to take the jobs for which no locals can compete. Locals are therefore excluded from the most significant part of the job market, higher education delivery.

In the private commercial sector also, local graduates can only go up so high and the large scale entry of Indians and Sri Lankans is not an accident. Locals are not considered worthy of holding such jobs so obviously expats have come in. Several sectors now have a huge percentage of white collar foreign workers.

But low grade local higher education has implications for the government too. The BCS cadres who basically run the country administratively and politically are products of this low performing system and so when they start paid work, their quality of work is also low. Hence, they start relying on loyalty rather than excellence to retain their jobs or to get promoted, which greatly leads to a decline in the quality of governance. This has a cyclical effect as low governance also makes a low priority of education. That promotes greater mediocrity, which goes on and on.

While it is true that the government remains unconcerned and Nahid goes on, one hopes that the education system will produce an expert or two who can tell the education authorities that local education has become as low as the health services. Thus money is spent to pay for foreign education, but the overall kitty of the state is becoming smaller.

And that cost may be borne by large scale under and poor employment as local graduates are brushed aside or simply fail to make the grade. The consequence of such a scenario is simply impossible to foretell, but there is no good news in this.