THE government appears to have been left with many issues to shore up to improve the education system, which is an influential target of the Sustainable Development Goals and a key instrument of development. Goal 4 has been adopted to attain 10 global targets to ensure an inclusive and equitable quality education and to promote lifelong learning opportunities for all. But the education system in Bangladesh is now constrained on several fronts as the number of public institutions and students enrolling on such institutions have not grown the way they were expected. Researchers observe that a high cost of education, especially less in non-government institutions and more in private institutions that have come up over the years to fill in the gap that the government鈥檚 unwillingness to set up schools and colleges has created, has been at the heart of the problem. The cost of education is much of a problem at post-primary levels. The increase in the number of non-government and private institutions has also proved troublesome because of low salary of teachers, inadequate teacher training and other facilities for the development in such institutions compared with all this in government institutions.
Coupled with all this is the problem of government鈥檚 unwillingness to expand and extend primary education up to Class VIII. Educationalists believe that mandatory primary schooling, to which the government seems to have been committed the most, should be extended up to Class VIII, as it was envisaged in the Qudrat-e-Khuda Education Commission report of 1972 and, even, the National Education Policy of 2010. They also believe that if primary education were extended up to Class VIII, and the state took the responsibility for the education of all up to the secondary level, the situation would be different and would greatly help the government in achieving an education system for an overall development of the nation. There are also issues of poor quality of education in government, non-government and private institutions that the government should urgently attend to. The teacher-student ratio is also high, making classroom teaching less effective. The issue of the poor quality of education is not only typical of primary and secondary but is also worth mending in tertiary education as not all private universities can impart quality education. The authorities looking after national education, at all levels, have time and again proved their futility in disciplining the education. All such issues together have taken national education to such a pass, warranting an urgent action on all fronts 鈥� education, research, policy, implementation and monitoring.
While the government and all its agencies responsible for national education, right from pre-primary to the tertiary level, must, therefore, attend to the issues that they all have so far left unattended to make education the driving force for development, intellectual and otherwise, the government must first increase allocation for education, which, as the United Nations recommends, should be at least 4 per cent of the gross domestic product. The allocation worryingly hovers around a mere 2 per cent of the gross domestic product. Keeping to the Dakar Framework for Action of 2000, the government was committed to increasing the allocation, at least 9 per cent by 2010.
