A sound base for primary education

Photo: A.M.Ahad/ Driknews

Education is a basic tool for self-defence in modern society. The feeling of powerlessness that goes with being illiterate comes through loud and clear in any conversation with ordinary people.
With 50% of the students dropping out before completing class V, as revealed in a
seminar in the recent past, it will be a challenge for the government to implement its pledge of achieving 100% literacy by 2014. The reasons for such appalling condition of elementary education in rural Bangladesh have been linked to a supposed lack of parental motivation compounded by past governments' apathy in creating a suitable infrastructure that can inspire children to be in school. It is partly true that poor parents, perhaps illiterate themselves, are not interested in education.
But the situation has changed greatly. Parents these days are not apathetic to education, and child labour does not seem to be a major obstacle also, then why are so many students out of school?
Education, whatever the government version may be, is still expensive. While free education is a constitutional right and books are free of cost, there are expenses for paper, transportation and food. Some findings suggested that for an average agricultural labourer, sending two children to primary school would cost about 10 to 15 days wages at the minimum.
The financial burden has a discouraging effect on the schooling of girls. While parents recognise that it is important for a girl to be educated, many feel that the benefits will be enjoyed by others, since a daughter typically leaves her family after marriage This outlook leads to a reluctance to spend on a daughter's education.
Effort is required to motivate a child to go to school, to ensure that he or she makes progress and to free him or her of domestic chores. The willingness of parents and children to make the required effort depends on what they can expect to get in return, in terms of schooling quality, which is, more often than not, abysmal.
There are many reasons for this. For a start, the physical infrastructure is woefully inadequate. The state of school buildings is the main reason why children are not drawn to school. Many of them have leaking roofs, making it difficult to hold classes during rains. In some schools, classes are held under trees during the dry season and are closed during rainy season.
With only three or four teachers for 200 to 250 students, how much attention can a student hope to receive from his or her teacher? One finding shows that children who have read up to class V are unable to read or write.
An expert committee constituted by the education ministry attributed the reason for the poor performance in the just concluded Junior School Certificate (JSC) and Junior Dakhil Certificate (JDC) examinations to shortage of efficient teachers in English and mathematics. English is hardly taught even at the secondary stage, and there is a dearth of competent teachers and standard textbooks for all stages.
Education from the primary to secondary level has become a low priority subject. Persons in authority speak volumes about improvement and launch ambitious programmes, but precious little has been achieved so far.
A report in a Bangla daily on February 26 said that there are 225 vacancies for headmaster in government primary schools, and only 49 assistant headmasters against the existing 460 vacant posts.
Although the education minister speaks of a silent revolution coming about in the education front, it is still not visible. For that to happen, it needs the commitment of the teachers backed by strong motivation of the school managing committee and parents alike, with financial support from the government.
The stark reality is that teachers' quality and teaching ability are also abysmal because many of them found their way to the teaching profession, which was not to their liking and interest. A report published in The Prothom Alo on February18, showed that in Badarganj upazila of Rangpur, teachers of 81 government primary schools participated in the electioneering campaign of the Teachers' Association without taking any class for one month. It seems nothing happened to those teachers, who played truant like the kids.
The most important component for the silent revolution, or more correctly speaking the knowledge revolution, that our education minister espouses is mass literacy. Surprisingly, the concerned ministry now spends more time fiddling around with the contents of textbooks than with trying to gauge how much literacy has either been achieved or can be achieved.
The recent move by the government to provide laptops and multimedia projectors to 20,500 public and private educational institutions by 2012 seems to be an ambitious programme when the very base of the primary education is tottering. We are going ahead with these projects at the time when we don't have regular supply of electricity. Nor do we have trained manpower to repair the faults in case of simple breakdown of these laptops.
Instead of pouring money into such wasteful projects, they should have been building primary schools worth their name in the far flung areas of the country. There should have been a serious attempt to build proper schools with adequate number of rooms instead of allowing most school children to manage without buildings and huddle together in one or two rooms.
The education sector is corruption-ridden, messy and chaotic. Many institutions have been pushed to the ropes by dearth of qualified and competent teachers, nepotism and political consideration in recruiting teachers, and lack of supervisory control in teaching and running the institution. How do you introduce computers or provide laptop to schools that function under trees? How do you explain internet in a country where literacy still means being able to sign your name?
The most important step at this stage should be to establish exactly which areas of the country have lagged behind and why. The best schools are those that use English as the medium of instruction. Most traditional vernacular schools, because of resource crunch and declining quality of teaching, are out of touch with the modern methods of education.
This pinpoints the responsibility of the government, which must provide in public education what parents are now obliged to buy privately. At the same time, the government, through introduction of attractive pay structure for the teachers, must take effective steps in putting a curb on private tuition by teachers at all levels at the expense of class room teaching. This will promote egalitarianism among students and restore an atmosphere of fair education.

The writer is a former teacher of physics and Controller of Examinations, BUET.
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