EDUCATIONAL SITUATION IN BANGLADESH

Md. Monzur Morshed
Graduate Student, Dept. of Forest Product
Mississippi State University
e-mail: mmm15@ra.msstate.edu

Being one of the poorest countries of the globe, we spend the least amount of money to educate our people. Though all the governments speak about allocating big budget for education every year, we don’t see the reflection in the society. We have a real big population for the small amount of money we can allocate. Even after that we have big diversity in our educational system. In near future we will have to discover a new educational evaluation system for us. The confusing issue should not confuse us.

At present we have different educational track in our country: 1) normal SSC, HSC, BA, MA etc. 2) English medium, 3) Madrasha, 4) vocational training. Fortunately our government imposed a regulation to correlate the obtained degrees in different systems. This makes some people smile to think about their achievement in the sense that he is equivalent to someone else. Unfortunately, people from different educational system compete in different competitive areas with different level of confidence. I never saw anybody to qualify in BCS from Madrasha system though some might have done that successfully. But the truth is that they are not competing in an equivalent level with others. Vocational education is a special type, which has proven to be effective to create good working hands. The English medium is creating highly qualified persons, who speaks better English then the people from other educational system. The government sponsored traditional educational system also has lot of variation in respect of quality. All these pictures are strong enough to confuse a person like me.

In Madrasha there are different tracks of learning. Some people will memorize the Quran and become Hafiz without knowing the meaning of the holly book. Some other will have a vast knowledge of religion and little knowledge of science. They are given degree from the Madrasha Board. Fortunately or unfortunately mostly they become Mollah or Imam. The bottom line is that they are not capable with this education to perform in other fields except preaching others or making Fotuaa. I am not saying that this educational system is bad, but I feel we have to do something to make this system work by changing it. We need people who have religious knowledge and who know to compete in the society with modern thoughts. The present picture of our Madrasha resembles the Geography knowledge of the prince in the first class of Anna in the movie “The King and I”.

The traditional teaching system claims about the same quality of teaching and examination system all over the country. But we all know that the student ration of getting admitted in higher learning institution is different in city and rural areas. The schools in the rural areas are loosing their potentiality everyday. This picture is an indication of inequality of the teaching system. A student with same result from a rural area can’t compete with one from Dhaka City. This is the ugly hidden truth.

Cheating in the examination has become an easy thing in the country. It seems from the news, students feels “CHEATING IS THEIR RIGHT”.. In the last SSC examination lot of students and teachers were expelled for cheating. This picture doesn’t mean that all students are cheating. But we can say some are cheating and doing good results out of that. In all center students don’t get the same opportunity to do so. This makes 1st division from different places of different quality. If 1st division should be the standard then why should I read in a strict school or take test in a center close to administrative headquarter?

The monitory situation gives a different picture. Schools in the traditional systems vary a lot in tuition and facilities. The Madrasha system is mostly free. The English medium system is highly expensive. That means: if you are very poor, go to Madrasha; if you are rich, go to English medium; and if you are middle class, find your school according to the money you can afford.

The ultimate result is difference in creativity and talent of people from different type of school system and different geographical location. This leaves us in a problem to evaluate a good educational system for our offspring. (Collected)