Bangladesh has officially become a lower middle income country. And that of course is great news. However in order to flourish even further, one of the things the country needs is a huge skilled workforce. And for that to happen education must be harmonised with employability.
With the ever increasing population there can hardly be an argument regarding the purpose of education in Bangladesh. There is no doubt that good citizenship, personal growth and developing value systems are vitally important. Yet it is clear that for the most part, education will be about employability here. Of course philosophers and thinkers are important for any society, but they too need to be employed like the wage labourers and the talented and the less able.
There exist two contrasting views on the employment scenario in this country. The employers cry hoarse about non-availability of talents in the market and we hear about a huge number of youth who are unable to find a well-paid job several years after completing their degrees.
There is a whole generation enrolled in schools waiting for teachers to show up in classrooms and do the job they were hired to do.
Researchers are wondering how they are going to make their meagre grants deliver global impact, while students in higher education are wondering whether their degrees earned in Bangladeshi universities are worth much after all. Especially after the damning research by the TIB exposed how corruption is all pervasive in the realm of higher education in the private sector.
There are shortages everywhere—teachers, researchers, laboratories. However, while the investment in classrooms and schools is great, it is time to release learning from the classrooms only. Learning should go to the student and must extend way beyond the walls of a classroom. There should be efforts towards building open libraries, letting village school buildings become community learning centres after school time with open access to solar-powered connected computers.
Creativity and research attitudes must be encouraged from the very beginning. Unfortunately our education sector is bound by regulations all the way from nursery to higher education. Capacity is restricted because of the binding constraints of impractical and often contrary regulations. Universities cannot hire faculty from abroad despite shortages.
It seems there is lack of proper planning, appropriate guidelines, and corrective measures while sanctioning new institutions and disciplines. Thus a large number of institutions are being established taking only profit into consideration and with little emphasis on quality of education. Many government institutions have become battlegrounds for political rivalry resulting in poor governance leading to poor quality of education.
Most of the technical education institutions including the better known ones are understaffed and lack in qualified, competent and suitable faculty members. The institutions mostly follow the traditional method of teaching giving little thought to the fact that information nowadays is readily available on the net and thus students would not get interested unless they get something extra by attending classes.
It is more of content delivery than knowledge delivery. The assignments given quite often are routine and do not involve any research or innovation. It is a great challenge to motivate and attract students to serious learning. Moreover, the evaluation system has not been made robust enough to find out the knowledge level of the students. The philosophy of the semester system and the continuous evaluation process are not being understood by the students and also by the faculty members. Thus they are applied in a routine manner and the students concentrate only on grades and not on learning.
