ISSUES of national education have recently come to the fore, with the cancellation of a textbook review and revision committee on September 28 apparently amidst opposition by some right-wing Islamist groups after it was formed on September 15. The process of national education also came to be questioned when the authorities cancelled the Higher Secondary Certification Examinations after six of them had been held before the July student protests, which sought reforms in civil service job reservations that intensified in the middle of the month, as a group of students broke into the secretariat on August 20 and demanded that the remaining examinations should not be held. The incident readily prompted the cancellation of the examinations and the authorities later worked out a mechanism to publish the Higher Secondary Certificate results based on results of their earlier public examinations. This was a populist decision. Students, their guardians and teachers also appear to have been confused about the return to the 2012 curriculum for the next academic year, with a whiff of the wind having been rife about a completely new curriculum that could be put to work in 2026.
In such a situation, educationists, educationalists and researchers held a discussion in Dhaka on October 2 where a call was put out for the interim government to establish an inclusive and continuous framework by doing away with issues that are said to create discrimination. They have also put out a call for the government to dispel ambiguity, if any, about its recent decisions concerning national education. They also demanded that the interim government 鈥� which has so far set up six commissions meant for electoral system reforms, police administrative reforms, judiciary reforms, anti-corruption reforms, public administration reforms and constitutional reforms 鈥� should also set up a commission to effect reforms in national education as they feel that education is not getting any priority in the reforms process. The experts who attended the discussion say that education has become the main weapon for the creation of discrimination and the main objective of the stakeholders in the sector should be to put in place an education system that could eradicate discrimination in society. The discussants say that reforms are important to ensure a continuous and integrated learning framework, from the pre-primary to the tertiary level, that would be consistent across all phases of education. They have called the attention of the authorities to inadequacies and urged effective resolution. The National Student Assessment 2022 report shows that 55 per cent of the students who have completed primary schooling have not achieved the competence related to foundational and mathematical literacy. The report shows that about 30 per cent of Class IX students take up science and only 15 per cent of them are girls. A 2024 National University research shows that most of the unemployed with university degrees pursued humanities disciplines.
The experts have, therefore, urged early steps to attend to such issues and inadequacies, from primary to tertiary education, by strengthening the institutions that are related to national education. It is high time the government took early steps in this direction.