The COVID situation and the theatre of introducing a so-called ‘competency-based’ curriculum pushed the teaching and learning situation to the lowest rung. In the true sense of the term, the teaching-learning scenario, receiving and giving education evaporated many years back from our classes, educational institutions, and society, with some exceptions occurring in some institutions like missionary and privately run schools and colleges along with cadet colleges of the country.
The tradition of attending class, conducting exams and publishing results happens without tangible effects, as nothing goes professionally and fruitfully. There is no account of what is going on in the classes, what students are learning, or how they participate in the teaching-learning situation. Classes go on, but what happens here there lies no real account of it. The result is that the gap between real learning and these traditional activities is widening daily.
The country now holds the most extensive public examination known as SSC. Every day, many examines remain absent, get expelled, and are copied on mass without facing any hurdles. The dailies of Bangladesh bring us to the second day of the SSC exam when we see 28 thousand 943 students remained absent, 83 were expelled and 18 teachers were also expelled.
This number is increasing while exams go forward. To this day, the percentage of remaining absent from this public examination stands at 1.65. On 15 April, the English first paper exam was held under nine general education boards where 13 lac 57 thousand 593 examines were registered, but 15 thousand 628 students were absent that day. In the Dakhil exam, 1 thousand 490 and the technical education board, 2 thousand 825 students remained absent, while 36 students were expelled the same day because of adopting unfair means.
On the first day of the SSC exam, the Bengali first paper was when students were seen writing answers and opening books. Interestingly, teachers were not seen to take any action. The same thing happened in the English exam, which was spread through social media.
Why does it happen? Many practical reasons can be held responsible for that. On the micro level, students don’t come to class regularly, even though some are in the class- they remain there just physically, mentally, and attentively. There lies no incentive, encouragement or positive threat from any side that will convince the students to be attentive in class, try to learn the subjects through repeated practice, ask questions to teachers and do several exercises on the topic. All this left from the education scene with the advent of COVID-19 and finally during the trumpeting of the so-called ‘new curriculum’, which pushed students into a culture of not reading, not learning, not sitting for assessment.
Students are now busy with demonstrations against teachers, and head teachers, chanting slogans against exams and for short syllabi without facing any exam. They were not seen in any demonstrations in the previous years when the nation-killing curriculum was introduced. They take to the streets repeatedly, sometimes for negligible or some flimsy grounds and sometimes for nothing. They cause untold suffering to the passers-by and people of all walks of life for any issue unrelated to them.
The country witnessed unrealistic and unreasonable demonstrations by students at the National University. They demanded that several colleges be upgraded into universities. Why? We want to say that we are just trying to fatten the process of educating unemployed people. The nation watches the polytechnic institutions’ unruly demonstration for realizing six demands.
We practically see that the students coming out of these institutions don’t acquire any skills of the 21st century which are necessary for getting jobs. They don’t gain any skills in their respective disciplines. Now, they are found in the streets announcing one program after another, remaining away from the class, laboratory, library or any workshop or industry where they should learn skills practically. The education sector harbours many loopholes. Those ways must be pretty different to address those issues.
To conduct the public examinations, a series of directions, as usual, go to the field to be followed, but who bothers? Despite this rotten situation, when examination scripts are distributed among the teachers for evaluation, the board authorities further direct the examiners to go through them sympathetically without being harsh or tight to check them. This was my experience when I used to be the examiner of boards or question setters. The situation in this area is far worse now.
Now, examiners are threatened so that no student should fail in any subject, and this threat produces hybrid results every year, causing irreparable losses to the students and the entire education system. Still, things continue happening. We need to decide whether we should allow it to happen further. This educational mismatch produces our officials, teachers and administrators.
Nothing can appear quite refined from it instead with a tinge of it. We know copying goes on even in the BCS exam. Not only that, question leakage in the previous BCS exams was an everyday affair, and some of the perpetrators have been arrested, but that rotten culture could not remove the officials it gave birth to. Therefore, society must see the consequences.
We all want good teachers to teach our children so that they can be engineers, doctors, police officers or administrators. Nobody wants their children to become teachers. So, how can we expect good teachers in the society? To receive real treatment, we go abroad as we do not trust our doctors, and there is no reason to trust them. When we need to do complex work or sophisticated construction, we must invite engineers from outside the country.
Our students have merit and creativity, but our entire system of teaching learning, nurturing and developing them and assessing their performance proves faulty. That’s why we produce doctors without real medical knowledge, and almost a similar situation goes with other areas. In the public examination, questions are very traditional. Students and teachers know which questions will come from which chapters. What kind of questions will be there? The style of questions is also known to them.
Despite these facts, students copy in the examination. Its adverse effect will appear in every aspect of their lives when they occupy any societal position. Even the madrasa students who are supposed to be guided by moral and religious education, when they are also copying, and their teachers are helping them, and words fail to explain the moral degradation of society! So, we should come forward to avoid staging the drama of education and embrace how real education can be instilled in the minds of our pupils.
About the Author
Masum Billah works as a President of the English Teachers' Association of Bangladesh (ETAB), Dhaka, Bangladesh. He previously worked as an Education Specialist at BRAC, an international NGO in Bangladesh.