EDUCATION has been a happening sector in the year that has passed by, with changes in the curriculum and textbooks, which reverted to a much previous state with changes in textbooks after the August 5 political changeover. The sector has always been happening at intervals since independence. But allocation for education has always remained low. The allocation for education as the percentage of the budget outlay has almost always hovered around 14; it has always been less than 2 as the percentage of the gross domestic product. With the education budget having been so low, nothing could effectively be done to improve national education while the number of students has only kept growing. Successive governments appear to have always given a short shrift to education. There has not been, in fact, any comprehensive education policy geared to ingrain democratic values in the students and to establish a democratic society. There has been one in existence 鈥� National Education Policy 2010 鈥� with lofty promises and professed aims. But neither has the policy been effective nor has it been fully implemented, leaving the education sector to keep limping. What the nation, therefore, needs is a comprehensive education policy that would be pro-people and would aim to establish a democratic society.
The constitution lays out that the state will adopt effective measures to establish a uniform, mass-oriented, universal system of education. But more than half a century into independence, the education scene is largely dominated by four broad streams, with a large number of sub-streams, with more than a dozen methods of instruction. At least four broad streams of education have, over a long time, given rise to four segments of people and the one segment is often in conflict with another, creating a situation that runs counter to the constitutional provision for a uniform and universal system of education. The interim government, installed on August 8, has so far instituted 11 commissions for reforms in affairs of the state, but it has yet to go for any such commission for education reforms, which is of utmost importance for the nation. Besides, education serves best when it is imparted in the mother tongue, or the first language, of the children. Although some effort for education in the first language is noticed in primary education, in a couple of streams, efforts are almost absent in tertiary education. Whilst all this happens, the constitution lays out that the state language of the republic is Bangla. There has also been a law, but it has hardly been able to make the government, the manager of the state, work in this direction. People in the upper rung of society still using English has created a false aspiration that has prompted many, even government agencies, to leave Bangla and everything that should have already been in Bangla in the lurch.
The government should, therefore, a horde of issues to shore up 鈥� an increase in the education budget, an effective education policy to establish democratic values, meaningful reforms of education and the imparting of education in the first language. The sooner the government does all this, the better.