quality education in bangladesh essay

Changing Course, Transforming Education in Bangladesh on International Day of Education 2022

Ms. Beatrice Kaldun, Head of Office and UNESCO Representative congratulated the organizers and highlighted that business as usual will not work and transforming education through Global Citizenship Education and Education for Sustainable Development is the way forward to address global challenges such as digital transformation and climate change. Referring to the Futures of Education report launched by UNESCO last November, she urged everyone to participate in the futures of education discussion and action – children, youth, parents, teachers, researchers, activists, employers, cultural and religious leaders.

More than 80 participants from the government and academic institutions attended the celebration event in person and online. Mr. Golam Hasibul Alam, Secretary of MoPME and Mr. Md. Abu Bakr Siddique, Secretary, SHED, MOE were also present at the event and made their intervention on the theme of IDE.

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Six elements accelerating education for a Smart Bangladesh and a Smart World

Date: 15 May, 2023

Reading Time: 11 Minutes

• COVID-19 rattled our age-old mindset and pushed us towards unprecedented opportunities to achieve quality education.
• A six-element blended education framework is integral to realize these opportunities.
• Multiple actors need to meaningfully and continuously collaborate, guided by an empowered convening entity, informed by global best practices.

When schools in Bangladesh closed during the COVID-19 pandemic, Ismat, a secondary school teacher from rural Ashuganj, knew that with each passing day, her students were falling behind more and more.

Instead of waiting for solutions to be handed down by her administration, she decided to “be the solution”. She experimented with ways of teaching using social media live, video conferencing and even visiting students’ homes on occasion—driven by a deep understanding of the digital context of their lives.

This story of Ismat was not unique in Bangladesh; many self-driven teachers innovated solutions to continue education virtually during the pandemic.

Schools were closed but thousands of teachers ensured that education was not.

How did teachers find the courage to pioneer such innovation? Partially through their decade-long experience of constructing and sharing digital content through a teacher-for-teacher social media platform.

During this time, various other educational innovations were also being launched by government and non-government actors through television, radio, phone and the internet.

From the ashes of the pandemic seemed to emerge the foundation for an education ecosystem with future-ready features. This led to the World Economic Forum piece 5 questions to ask now to shape blended learning of the future. This piece, in turn, inspired the formation of an interministerial National Blended Education Taskforce in Bangladesh, led by the Minister of Education, with ten other ministries spanning across education, health, skills development, ICT, telecommunications and even planning and finance and various non-state educational actors.

This comprehensive formation was a first in the country’s history to solve the problems of education: make it market-ready, future-ready, and aspiration-ready. It was to leverage cutting edge technologies and methods and do it together, involving whole-of-government and whole-of-society.

This empowered committee generated plans for an inclusive blended education ecosystem, which combined high-, low-, and no-tech resources to enable all learners to have greater control over where they learn, when they learn, and how they learn.

Six elements of education for a Smart Bangladesh

How could education be comprehensively planned with such diverse entities?

A simple sense-making framework had to be used: its result is the ten-year  Blended Education Master Plan , costing around $20 billion.

The plan is guided by the following six elements:

1. Teaching learning practices: learning how to learn

Internet search engines mean that the days of memorizing facts are long gone.

If our learners are to thrive in an increasingly complex and ambiguous tomorrow, they must learn how to learn, ask questions and solve problems. There are six-figure jobs being offered now simply to give ChatGPT better prompts.

Problem-solving cannot be taught through mere lectures.

The ongoing national curriculum reform in Bangladesh focuses on experiential learning and problem-based learning (PBL) approaches in classrooms. Early signs show promise, demonstrating that suburban students are doing better than their urban counterparts because the latter are methodically trained by schools and private tutors to memorise and regurgitate.

However, the acceptability of these new approaches by teachers and families varies, given the radical departure from the conventional teaching-learning methods.

2. Educational content and resources: ensuring inclusion and personalisation

Ismat’s story would not be possible had digital content and resources not been developed to continue education virtually during the pandemic.

This took unprecedented collaboration between government entities, teachers, digital content creators, startups, EdTech companies and development partners.

As teaching-learning practices are to change, so must all content and resources — teacher guides, workbooks, school-based resources and learning content. Various public and private institutions are already putting up massive budgets to produce digital content: for instance, the approved budget of various digital content development initiatives of the ICT Ministry is around $800 million until 2027.

What is needed is careful coordination across all the public and private stakeholders producing digital content so that both duplication and gaps may be avoided.

3. Assessment: measuring the real-time of and for learning

To help Ismat’s students learn, traditional assessments of learning — mostly of a summative nature — are not sufficient.

More formative and continuous assessment for learning must be the way, which goes hand-in-hand with experiential learning and the emphasis on learning to learn.

Continuous assessment tools are being piloted in Bangladesh, empowering teachers to use a smartphone app to track student assessment and learning. AI plays a major role in this transformation.

This has enabled teachers to generate personalised reports for learners, reduce learner ‘wait’ time for feedback, lower teacher time spent on grading and strengthen data-driven decision-making systems for administrators.

It must be understood that formative assessment is a major paradigm shift for teachers, administrators and even parents. It must be nurtured carefully for adoption.

4. Teacher professional development: transforming ‘sages on the stage’ to ‘guides on the side’

Ismat knew how to execute during the pandemic. Imagine how much bigger her impact could have been had she been trained the right way — to be a facilitator and not a mere lecturer?

Dependence on face-to-face teacher professional development (TPD) is costly and resource-intensive, leading to a wastage in time and money and causing disruption in already teacher-starved schools. Bangladesh’s move towards blended TPD for its 1 million teacher workforce is showing great promise, enabling teachers to have more time in the classroom and supportive materials.

This transition to blended TPD is heavily facilitated by nearly 2,500 tech-savvy teacher ambassadors. These are ‘super-teachers’ acting as change agents within teacher communities.

Ismat, for example, was encouraged by teacher ambassadors over the years and she is becoming a teacher ambassador herself.

This very promising transformation of the teachers’ role from sages to guides requires mental rewiring and cultural disruption, which must go through consistent behavioural nudges by the teacher educators and educational administration.

5. Employment: learning to earn

The mismatch between supply and demand is an iconic issue for graduates from education systems in developing countries.

It is often facetiously said that education creates more unemployment than it creates employment, at least in the tertiary sector. This is because the archaic content and style of education fails to supply graduates with the appropriate knowledge and skills demanded by the market, domestic and foreign alike.

To address this, the government of Bangladesh developed a one-stop collective intelligence platform. This enables matchmaking among employers, job seekers and skills training providers. The platform also empowers policymakers to orchestrate the right coordination in a timely manner to ensure evidence-informed decisions.

The collective intelligence platform requires continuous and trusted collaboration among the 20+ ministries, 40+ industry associations and thousands of training providers for meaningful data analysis and informed decision-making.

6. Inclusive infrastructure: leaving no one behind

Without thinking about devices, digital platforms, electricity, data hosting and connectivity, access to blended education cannot be realised.

To raise the bar for what we mean by access, infrastructure has to be inclusive and meaningful, ensuring an appropriate device and high-speed broadband connectivity at affordable cost.

Curiously, with all the public and private expenditures on digital infrastructure, we are still very far from affordable universal broadband access for educational institutions, teachers and students. In Bangladesh, the cost of infrastructure is estimated to be about $8 billion. Global public-private partnerships are necessary to make this happen. Without it, the richness of the digital content, the maturity of TPD and the market-readiness of assessments do not reach the learners.

Working together as public and private sectors, local and global partners, we need to innovate disruptive business models to create public infrastructure for blended education for all.

Smart Bangladesh for a Smart World

At the World Economic Forum’s Annual Meeting 2022 in Davos, we announced Bangladesh’s participation in the Forum’s Accelerators Network, fostering public-private-people partnerships to continuously mature the country’s blended education ecosystem along the six elements.

In line with Vision 2041 for Smart Bangladesh recently unveiled by Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina, the resulting Smart Education Accelerator intends to:

Connect with local and global best practices

This will be done by establishing a community of purpose, consisting of a diverse range of actors (public, private and individuals). Physical and virtual spaces will be curated to facilitate connection and trust among the relevant actors. In the spirit of connection, the accelerator will play a part in clarifying purposes, convening the right people, cultivating trust, coordinating trust and collaborating generously.

Innovate to solve the country’s educational challenges

This will involve providing resources and support for rapid prototyping, research and development of inclusive blended education solutions. The types of innovation will be technological, pedagogical and financial.

Scale  up the most impactful innovations, based on the evidence, to transform the comprehensive education ecosystem

The appropriate scaling strategy will need to be explored, whether it is through seeking government adoption, distributing through existing platforms, spreading the idea through open-source, etc.

We are confident that the model will inform similar transformative processes in other countries, both developing and developed, resulting in a smarter world where all its learners are equipped to ‘be the solutions’ for the challenges of today and tomorrow.

This is our commitment from ‘Bangladesh to the world.’

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Six elements accelerating education for a Smart Bangladesh and a Smart World

Smart Bangladesh takes the country's education system to the next level. Image:  Unsplash/Robo Wunderkind

.chakra .wef-1c7l3mo{-webkit-transition:all 0.15s ease-out;transition:all 0.15s ease-out;cursor:pointer;-webkit-text-decoration:none;text-decoration:none;outline:none;color:inherit;}.chakra .wef-1c7l3mo:hover,.chakra .wef-1c7l3mo[data-hover]{-webkit-text-decoration:underline;text-decoration:underline;}.chakra .wef-1c7l3mo:focus,.chakra .wef-1c7l3mo[data-focus]{box-shadow:0 0 0 3px rgba(168,203,251,0.5);} Dipu Moni

Anir chowdhury, shakil ahmed.

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Stay up to date:.

Listen to the article

• COVID-19 rattled our age-old mindset and pushed us towards unprecedented opportunities to achieve quality education.
• A six-element blended education framework is integral to realise these opportunities.
• Multiple actors need to meaningfully and continuously collaborate, guided by an empowered convening entity, informed by global best practices.

When schools in Bangladesh closed during the COVID-19 pandemic, Ismat, a secondary school teacher from rural Ashuganj, knew that with each passing day, her students were falling behind more and more.

Instead of waiting for solutions to be handed down by her administration, she decided to “be the solution”. She experimented with ways of teaching using social media live, video conferencing and even visiting students’ homes on occasion—driven by a deep understanding of the digital context of their lives.

This story of Ismat was not unique in Bangladesh; many self-driven teachers innovated solutions to continue education virtually during the pandemic.

Schools were closed but thousands of teachers ensured that education was not.

The World Economic Forum’s Platform for Shaping the Future of Digital Economy and New Value Creation helps companies and governments leverage technology to develop digitally-driven business models that ensure growth and equity for an inclusive and sustainable economy.

• The Digital Transformation for Long-Term Growth programme is bringing together industry leaders, innovators, experts and policymakers to accelerate new digital business models that create the sustainable and resilient industries of tomorrow.
• The Forum’s EDISON Alliance is mobilizing leaders from across sectors to accelerate digital inclusion . Its 1 Billion Lives Challenge harnesses cross-sector commitments and action to improve people’s lives through affordable access to digital solutions in education, healthcare, and financial services by 2025.

Contact us for more information on how to get involved.

How did teachers find the courage to pioneer such innovation? Partially through their decade-long experience of constructing and sharing digital content through a teacher-for-teacher social media platform.

During this time, various other educational innovations were also being launched by government and non-government actors through television, radio, phone and the internet.

From the ashes of the pandemic seemed to emerge the foundation for an education ecosystem with future-ready features. This led to the World Economic Forum piece 5 questions to ask now to shape blended learning of the future . This piece, in turn, inspired the formation of an interministerial National Blended Education Taskforce in Bangladesh, led by the Minister of Education, with ten other ministries spanning across education, health, skills development, ICT, telecommunications and even planning and finance and various non-state educational actors.

This comprehensive formation was a first in the country’s history to solve the problems of education: make it market-ready, future-ready, and aspiration-ready. It was to leverage cutting edge technologies and methods and do it together, involving whole-of-government and whole-of-society.

This empowered committee generated plans for an inclusive blended education ecosystem, which combined high-, low-, and no-tech resources to enable all learners to have greater control over where they learn, when they learn, and how they learn.

Six elements of education for a Smart Bangladesh

How could education be comprehensively planned with such diverse entities?

A simple sense-making framework had to be used: its result is the ten-year Blended Education Master Plan , costing around $20 billion.

The plan is guided by the following six elements:

1. Teaching learning practices: learning how to learn

Internet search engines mean that the days of memorizing facts are long gone.

If our learners are to thrive in an increasingly complex and ambiguous tomorrow, they must learn how to learn, ask questions and solve problems. There are six-figure jobs being offered now simply to give ChatGPT better prompts.

Problem-solving cannot be taught through mere lectures.

The ongoing national curriculum reform in Bangladesh focuses on experiential learning and problem-based learning (PBL) approaches in classrooms. Early signs show promise, demonstrating that suburban students are doing better than their urban counterparts because the latter are methodically trained by schools and private tutors to memorise and regurgitate.

However, the acceptability of these new approaches by teachers and families varies, given the radical departure from the conventional teaching-learning methods.

2. Educational content and resources: ensuring inclusion and personalisation

Ismat’s story would not be possible had digital content and resources not been developed to continue education virtually during the pandemic.

This took unprecedented collaboration between government entities, teachers, digital content creators, startups, EdTech companies and development partners.

As teaching-learning practices are to change, so must all content and resources — teacher guides, workbooks, school-based resources and learning content. Various public and private institutions are already putting up massive budgets to produce digital content: for instance, the approved budget of various digital content development initiatives of the ICT Ministry is around $800 million until 2027.

What is needed is careful coordination across all the public and private stakeholders producing digital content so that both duplication and gaps may be avoided.

3. Assessment: measuring the real-time of and for learning

To help Ismat’s students learn, traditional assessments of learning — mostly of a summative nature — are not sufficient.

More formative and continuous assessment for learning must be the way, which goes hand-in-hand with experiential learning and the emphasis on learning to learn.

Continuous assessment tools are being piloted in Bangladesh, empowering teachers to use a smartphone app to track student assessment and learning. AI plays a major role in this transformation.

This has enabled teachers to generate personalised reports for learners, reduce learner 'wait' time for feedback, lower teacher time spent on grading and strengthen data-driven decision-making systems for administrators.

It must be understood that formative assessment is a major paradigm shift for teachers, administrators and even parents. It must be nurtured carefully for adoption.

4. Teacher professional development: transforming 'sages on the stage' to 'guides on the side'

Ismat knew how to execute during the pandemic. Imagine how much bigger her impact could have been had she been trained the right way — to be a facilitator and not a mere lecturer?

Dependence on face-to-face teacher professional development (TPD) is costly and resource-intensive, leading to a wastage in time and money and causing disruption in already teacher-starved schools. Bangladesh’s move towards blended TPD for its 1 million teacher workforce is showing great promise, enabling teachers to have more time in the classroom and supportive materials.

This transition to blended TPD is heavily facilitated by nearly 2,500 tech-savvy teacher ambassadors. These are 'super-teachers' acting as change agents within teacher communities.

Ismat, for example, was encouraged by teacher ambassadors over the years and she is becoming a teacher ambassador herself.

This very promising transformation of the teachers’ role from sages to guides requires mental rewiring and cultural disruption, which must go through consistent behavioural nudges by the teacher educators and educational administration.

5. Employment: learning to earn

The mismatch between supply and demand is an iconic issue for graduates from education systems in developing countries.

It is often facetiously said that education creates more unemployment than it creates employment, at least in the tertiary sector. This is because the archaic content and style of education fails to supply graduates with the appropriate knowledge and skills demanded by the market, domestic and foreign alike.

To address this, the government of Bangladesh developed a one-stop collective intelligence platform. This enables matchmaking among employers, job seekers and skills training providers. The platform also empowers policymakers to orchestrate the right coordination in a timely manner to ensure evidence-informed decisions.

The collective intelligence platform requires continuous and trusted collaboration among the 20+ ministries, 40+ industry associations and thousands of training providers for meaningful data analysis and informed decision-making.

6. Inclusive infrastructure: leaving no one behind

Without thinking about devices, digital platforms, electricity, data hosting and connectivity, access to blended education cannot be realised.

To raise the bar for what we mean by access, infrastructure has to be inclusive and meaningful, ensuring an appropriate device and high-speed broadband connectivity at affordable cost.

Curiously, with all the public and private expenditures on digital infrastructure, we are still very far from affordable universal broadband access for educational institutions, teachers and students. In Bangladesh, the cost of infrastructure is estimated to be about $8 billion. Global public-private partnerships are necessary to make this happen. Without it, the richness of the digital content, the maturity of TPD and the market-readiness of assessments do not reach the learners.

Working together as public and private sectors, local and global partners, we need to innovate disruptive business models to create public infrastructure for blended education for all.

Smart Bangladesh for a Smart World

At the World Economic Forum’s Annual Meeting 2022 in Davos, we announced Bangladesh’s participation in the Forum's Accelerators Network, fostering public-private-people partnerships to continuously mature the country’s blended education ecosystem along the six elements.

In line with Vision 2041 for Smart Bangladesh recently unveiled by Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina, the resulting Smart Education Accelerator intends to:

Connect with local and global best practices

This will be done by establishing a community of purpose, consisting of a diverse range of actors (public, private and individuals). Physical and virtual spaces will be curated to facilitate connection and trust among the relevant actors. In the spirit of connection, the accelerator will play a part in clarifying purposes, convening the right people, cultivating trust, coordinating trust and collaborating generously.

Innovate to solve the country’s educational challenges

This will involve providing resources and support for rapid prototyping, research and development of inclusive blended education solutions. The types of innovation will be technological, pedagogical and financial.

Scale up the most impactful innovations, based on the evidence, to transform the comprehensive education ecosystem

The appropriate scaling strategy will need to be explored, whether it is through seeking government adoption, distributing through existing platforms, spreading the idea through open-source, etc.

We are confident that the model will inform similar transformative processes in other countries, both developing and developed, resulting in a smarter world where all its learners are equipped to 'be the solutions' for the challenges of today and tomorrow.

This is our commitment from 'Bangladesh to the world.'

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Education system in Bangladesh needs to change

In Bangladesh, although primary education is free and the government provides the textbooks, more than 4.3 million children aged 6-15 years are not in school and around 42 million people – about 26 percent of the population – are still illiterate. Moreover, while our school enrolment rate is still high, the dropout rate is even higher. Data from the Bangladesh Bureau of Educational Information and Statistics show that, in 2020, the dropout rate was 17.2 percent at the primary level, 35.76 percent at the secondary level, and 21.16 percent at the higher secondary level. Most of these dropouts happen in rural areas. Because the quality of schools and standard of teaching there are poor, many parents feel reluctant to send their children to schools. They find the current education system to be of little use in practical life as neither textbooks nor the curriculum is relevant to their situation or match the requirements of the present job market.

 In the past few years, numerous experiments have been carried out in the name of modernising and updating our primary, secondary, and higher secondary education. Yet, the existing education curriculum is not aligned with industry needs. While schools/colleges across the globe are focusing more on soft skills such as team-building, problem-solving, critical thinking, communication, negotiation, decision-making, etc., our education system is still stuck in the past.

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Research suggests that our garments, real estate, telecommunication, information and technology sectors are facing severe shortage of skilled manpower. As a result, foreign workers are being hired. There is no specific data on outbound remittances, but industry insiders say that foreign nationals working in Bangladesh remit about USD 6 billion altogether every year to their countries.

Put education back on track

Bangladesh has a vision to become a developed nation by 2041 and to achieve that, we need skilled workers. But our education budget doesn't reflect the urgency of developing human resources. Our current expenditure on education is the lowest among South Asian countries. The country spends around 2 percent of its GDP on education, whereas India spends 4.6 percent, Afghanistan and Maldives 4.1 percent, Nepal 5.2 percent, and Bhutan spends 6.6 percent of their respective GDPs on education. Despite demands from experts to increase the allocation to between four to six percent of GDP, again we saw poor allocation for education in the national budget for FY2022-23.

The Unesco recommends spending six percent of GDP on the education sector. Bangladesh ranked 112th out of 138 countries in the Global Knowledge Index 2020. It has scored 35.9 – again the lowest among South Asian countries.

We all know that education is a major driving force of development in any modern society, and that the quality of workers is the central determining factor of economic progress. Therefore, it is important for Bangladesh to focus on improving the quality of its education – the kind of education that will help individuals acquire the knowledge and skills to meet all the needs of the jobs of today and tomorrow.

Politics of School Examinations

The government has recently been putting more emphasis on setting up technical schools and colleges in different upazilas. Undoubtedly, vocational training could be an important element for future development, and in reducing unemployment, inequality, and poverty. But our policymakers need to realise that if someone's basic education is weak, vocational training will hardly be of use to them. It is therefore necessary to redesign our primary, secondary, and higher secondary education. Pre-vocational education, information and communication technology (ICT) based education must be considered a priority area for inclusion and development from the secondary level (Class 9) to the higher secondary level (Class 12), to provide a foundation of basic skills and knowledge that will help students acquire technical skills, learn how to apply their knowledge, and use creativity in their work. Also, we should keep in mind that merely setting up technical schools and colleges is not enough. We need to ensure they have skilled teachers, lab facilities, safe and supportive learning environments and, more importantly, offer the most up‐to‐date technical, professional, and job‐oriented courses for young graduates.

 Some people in our country tend to see our large population as an asset. There is no denying the fact that the population of a country is the greatest social capital it can have. But as the saying goes, "People without education are like weapons without bullets." Research shows that, at present, about two-thirds of our total population is of working age, which means the country is going through a "demographic window of opportunity." To reap the benefits of this opportunity, our young people need to be trained properly so they can contribute to the development of the nation. Otherwise, Bangladesh may find it very difficult to achieve higher economic growth.

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ইরানে ক্ষেপণাস্ত্র হামলা চালিয়েছে ইসরায়েল

ইরানের রাষ্ট্রীয় সংবাদমাধ্যমের তথ্য অনুযায়ী, বেশ কয়েকটি শহরে ফ্লাইট চলাচল স্থগিত করা হয়েছে। 

মূল্যস্ফীতির তুলনায় বাড়ছে না মজুরি, তীব্র সংকটে শ্রমজীবীরা

Quality of Education : How to Ensure it in Bangladesh Essay

Quality of Education: How to Ensure it in Bangladesh ( in Bengali শিক্ষার মান : কীভাবে বাংলাদেশে এটি নিশ্চিত করা যায় ) is a common topic in many competitive exams in Bangladesh. Today we will create a sample or essay for students. We suggest not memorising the essay but rather taking an idea and writing the essay later on by own language and style.

Table of Contents

Quality of Education: How to Ensure it in Bangladesh

Introduction:.

Bangladesh is one of the most densely populated countries in the world with about 160 million people within an area of 1,47,570 square kilometres. Her vast population is one of the major resources. But the problem lies in transforming the potential people into a productive force and ensuring a dynamic environment for social, economic and political development. Though the literacy rate is officially said to be 66% according to a private survey the rate is only 53.7%. Education, therefore, has been recognized as a priority sector by all governments since her independence.

The education system in Bangladesh is characterised by the co-existence of three separate streams. The mainstream happens to be a vernacular based secular education carried over the colonial past. There also exists a separate system of religious education. Finally, based on the use of English as the medium of instruction, another stream of education modelled after the British system has rapidly grown in metropolitan cities in Bangladesh.

Present Education System in Bangladesh:

The present education system of Bangladesh may be broadly divided into three major stages, such as-Primary, Secondary and Tertiary Education. Primary level institutions impart primary education basically, Junior secondary, secondary and higher secondary level institutions impart secondary education. Degree pass, degree honours, masters and other higher-level institutions or equivalent sections of other related institutions impart tertiary education.

The education system is operationally categorized into two streams; Primary education (Grade I-V) managed by the ministry of primary and mass education and the primary terminal examinations and ibtedayi terminal examination have been started. The government introduced the public examination for class V students in 2009. Only students of general schools sat for the exams last year. But this year (2010) the madrasah students are also taking the examination.

Another grade (V-VIII) Junior School Certificate (JSC) and Junior Dhakil Certificate (JDC) examination for class VIII students held across the country in the first week of November replacing the previous annual and junior scholarship exams. This examination was held under eight general education boards and madrasah board under the same question paper across the country with the participation of 19 lakh examinees.

It was decided that students will be admitted to class IX on the basis of the result of this examination and no separate examination will be held for admission in class IX.

During college admission, the results of JSC and equivalent along with the result of the SSC examination will be badly needed to justify their merit.

And, the post-primary stream of education is further classified into four types in terms of curriculum general education, madrasah education, technical vocational education and professional education.

1. General Education

(a) primary education:.

The first level of education is comprised of 5 years of formal schooling (.class/grades 1-V). Education, at this stage, normally begins at 6+ years of age up 11 years. Primary education is generally imparted in primary schools. Nevertheless, other types of institutions like Kindergartens and junior sections attached to English Medium Schools are also imparting it.

(b) Secondary Education:

The secondary level of education is comprised of 7 (3+2+ 2) years of formal schooling. The first three years (grades VI-VIII) is referred to us junior secondary while the last two years (grades XI-XII) is called higher secondary.

There is diversification of courses after three years of schooling in the junior secondary level. Vocational and technical courses are offered in vocational and trade institutions schools. Moreover, there are high schools where SSC (Vocational) courses have been introduced. In secondary education, there are three streams of courses as Humanities, Science and Business Education, which started from class IX, where the students are free to choose their courses of education.

The academic programme terminates at the end of class X when students are to appear at the public examination called S.S.C (Secondary School Certificates). The Board of Intermediate and Secondary Education (BISE) conducts the SSC examination.

Secondary education is designed to prepare the students to enter the higher secondary stage. The course is of two-year duration (XI-XII) which is being offered by intermediate section of degree or masters colleges.

(c) Tertiary Education

(i) college:.

The third stage of education is comprised of 2-6 years of formal schooling. The minimum requirement for admission to higher education is the Higher Secondary Certificate (HSC). HSC holders are qualified to enrol in 3-year degree pass courses while for honours, they may enrol in 4-year bachelors’ degree honour courses in degree-level colleges or in the Universities.

After successful completion of a pass/honours bachelors’ degree course, master’s degree courses are of one year for honours bachelor degree holders and 2 years for pass bachelor degree holders. For those aspiring to take up M. Phill and Ph. D courses in selected disciplines or areas of specialization, the duration is of 2 years for M. Phill and 3-4 years for Ph. D after completing master’s degree. Higher education is being offered in the universities and post HSC level colleges and institutes of diversified studies in professional, technical and other special types of education.

(ii) University:

There are 126 universities in Bangladesh. Out of these, 37 universities are in the public sector while the other 92 are in private sector universities. Out of 37 public sector universities, 35 universities provide regular classroom instruction facilities and services. Bangladesh Open University (BOU) conducts non-campus distance education programmes, especially in teacher education and offers Bachelor of Education (B.Ed) and Master of Education (M.Ed) degrees.

Bangladesh National University mainly functions as an affiliating university for degree and postgraduate degree level education at different colleges and institutions in different fields of study. After successful completion of the special courses, it conducts final examinations and awards degrees, diplomas and certificates to successful candidates. The degrees are B.A, BSS, BSc, BBS (pass and honours) MA, MSc, MSS, MBS and MFA. Moreover, this University also offers LLB and other degrees. Bangladesh National University offers part-time training to university teachers.

2. Madrasha Education:

The old scheme of madrasah education was introduced in 1870 with the establishment of Calcatta Madrasha. In madrassa education, one can leam Islamic religions as complementary to each other in the system of education. The madrasah education system has been continuing with some modifications according to the demand of the time, and many madrasahs grew up in this sub-continent.

(a) Primary Level or Ebtedayee Education:

This is equivalent to the primary level of general education. The first level of madrasah education consists of 5 years of schooling (grades I-V). Ebtedayee education is imparted in independent “Ebtedayee Madrashas” and Ebtedyace sections of Dhakil, Alim, Fazil and Kamil madrasas. It is also imparted in some Quami-Kharizi madrassas.

(b) Secondary Level:

The secondary level of madrasah education consists of 7 (5+2) years of formal schooling. There is diversification of courses after three years of schooling in secondary level of education from grade XI Alim stages. There is a stream of Courses such as humanities, science and business education, where students are free to choose their courses of study. Most of these madrasahs at this level provide co-education. However, there are some single-gender madrasahs in this level of madrasah education.

(e) Tertiary Level:

The Bangladesh Madrasha Education Board has the following functions as regards madrasah education: grant affiliation to different levels of madrasah from Ebtedayee to Kamil’s; prescribes syllabus and curriculum; conducts public examinations (Dhakil to Kamil) and Ebtedayee terminal examination and JDC. (Junior Dhakil Examination). Besides in the public system of madrasah education, there are a good number of private madrasah for the Muslim students, namely: Hafizia, Qiratia, Quami and Nizamiah.

3. Technical and Vocational Level:

The students whose interests are not strictly academic may find technical-vocational programmes more interesting more valuable for their future. Govt. tries to ensure that the course curriulum should be relevant to students, interest and aspiration while at the same time it should address the needs of the job market.

(a) Primary Level:

There is no technical-vocational institution in primary level education. Ebtedayee in the first level (primary level) of madrasah education has no scope for technical-vocational education.

Vocational courses start from the secondary level. The certificate courses prepare skilled workers in different vocations starting ninth grade after completion of three years of schooling in secondary school. Recently 2 years duration vocational courses have been introduced at the higher secondary level in government-managed vocational training institutes.

Diploma courses prepare the Diploma Engineers at the polytechnic institutes. There is a technical education board called Bangladesh Technical Education Board (BTEB). It conducts examinations of the students completing different courses in different vocational and technical education and awards certificates to the successful candidates.

Conclusion:

Above all, the government of Bangladesh gives emphasis on the quality of education. The primary and Ebtedayee examinations had been started to standardise the education system. Junior School Certificate (JSC) and Junior Dhakil Certificate (JDC) (grade VI-VIII) have been started this year. And, every government is sympathetic towards implementing better education policy and a large portion of the budget is allocated to education.

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Essay on Higher Education in Bangladesh

Hints: Introduction, UGC, State of Higher Education in Bangladesh, Scarcity of Institutions, Lack of Modernization, Cost, Session Jam and Politicization, Fund Crisis, Tuition Fees, Grading Policy, Admission Test, Quality of Education, Research, Conclusion.

Introduction

The Government of Bangladesh operates many institutions in the primary, secondary, and higher secondary levels. In the past, tertiary education was primarily English-controlled, Now reforms have been processed to leave such practices in the past and are looking forward to education as a way to provide a somewhat poverty-stricken nation with a brighter future. Higher Education in Bangladesh refers to education pursued after the higher secondary level. After completing higher secondary education in Bangladesh, one can pursue graduate-level education in general or other professional courses. One needs to spend 4 years to earn an honors bachelor’s degree from a university. The universities can be either in the public sector or in the private sector. Moreover, there are quite a good number of Madrasah, technical institutes, and general colleges that provide bachelor’s degrees. However, the enrolment in the higher education institutes in Bangladesh is conspicuously low as compare to other developing countries of the world. Reforms in the higher education system of Bangladesh are, therefore, the need of the hour.

UGC (University Grants Commission of Bangladesh)

The UGC was established in 1973. It oversees 29 public universities; around 1800 colleges under the National University; the Bangladesh Open University; and 51 private universities. UGC is also responsible for distributing government funds to universities in the public sector. The final responsibility of the UGC is to create an environment where universities in Bangladesh will be a center for both quality education and a seat of knowledge creation and extension.

State of Higher Education in Bangladesh

The problem with university education in Bangladesh probably lies in the classic dilemma of quantity and quality control. Despite all our efforts, only 8 percent of the university-going population (18-25 years) is currently enrolled in a university in Bangladesh. The public universities accommodate approximately 1,50,000 students; the National University another 800,000; and the Open University another 250,000. All the private universities accommodate around 1,30,000 students.

Scarcity of Institutions

Each year more students are completing their HSC examinations. Their appetite for higher education has also been whetted since reasonable and respectable jobs are not available without a basic graduation degree. Unfortunately, the malaise of resource inadequacy continues to deprive higher education of needed funds to build capacity in the education system, and it is becoming increasingly difficult to close the gap. In addition to physical capacity, there is also a tremendous need to add human capacity (mainly qualified teachers) to the higher education system very rapidly.

Tertiary gross enrolment ratio, Male, 2002, % (UNESCO) 8 Tertiary gross enrolment ratio, Female, 2002, % (UNESCO) 4 Tertiary gross enrolment ratio, Total, 2002, % (UNESCO) 6 Tertiary gross enrolment ratio = Enrolment of tertiary students of all ages expressed as a percentage of the tertiary school-age population.

Lack of Modernization

New knowledge and its benefits are often unavailable to those who have already gone through the higher education system. Many of these people hold responsible positions. Today, many of them are stuck with outdated knowledge because once they are out of the education system they have little opportunity to get back in to enhance their knowledge and understanding of new developments, theories, and methods that might serve them better.

The cost of higher education, according to some, is driven by a frenzy to make money. There is a contention that some educational institutions “sell” certificates without requiring students to attend classes. Private universities also charge fees that seem to border on extortion. Such fees make education accessible only to the moneyed people. The pricing pressure imposed by academia is creating adverse ripple effects in the economy that must be addressed and rationalized because these prices are not based on free-market forces, but on restricted market structures that represent localized monopoly conditions.

Session Jam and Politicization

The inevitable problem with public universities soon surfaced session jam and politicization of the university administration. Professor Islam made one thing very clear that all citizens have the right to express their political views, whether they are students or teachers. Nevertheless, having said so, an institutional arrangement has to be reached where such political expression doesn’t hamper the academic activities of universities anywhere in Bangladesh. Things can’t and won’t change overnight, but Professor Islam assured us that the UGC and the government are concerned about the issue just as much as are most teachers, students, and guardians.

Fund Crisis

Despite funds from the Government, public universities lack adequate funding and adequate infrastructure (physical and non-physical). The remuneration of teachers is lowly compared to their alternative in the private sector. Not receiving “efficiency wage”, teachers in the public sector are sometimes forced to look for part-time employment in the private sector. Public universities have limited access and limited scope to raise finance outside funds generated from the Government.

Tuition Fees

Tuition fees in the public sector are not rationalized by markets. Any policy, however, has to be somewhere in between a market and a social solution. The debate pointed to donations from generous citizens and alumni. This is a practice observed in even the richest universities in the world, Oxford, and Cambridge just to name a few. Private universities face a different set of problems. Since private universities have to raise funds from their own sources, they tend to emphasize subjects that have more of a market value than only a social value. They also tend to locate predominantly in Dhaka and/or where more affluent families live. Tuition fees can burden the budgets of the parents. High tuition fees can also totally discourage genuine meritorious students from the thought of applying for admission to a good private university.

Grading Policy

The grading policy differs between public and private universities and across public and private universities. It even varies within the same university and sometimes within the same department of a university. This sends mixed signals to the job market. UGC is trying to move towards a common grading policy for all universities in Bangladesh.

Admission Test

A common grading policy precipitates a common admission test. Public university students raised this issue. If medical colleges in Bangladesh can have a common admission test, why are not all public universities too? This would save time, money, and hassle for students and their families. Surely this is ‘food for thought’.

Quality of Education

Although the UGC is an overseer of the quality of university education in Bangladesh, it’s ultimately the universities themselves who have to address the issue. The UGC is exploring ways on how private universities can also receive funds from the Government. It’s also high time we all thought about providing e-library facilities in all universities with access to the Internet. A university is not only a seat of teaching but also a center for knowledge creation and knowledge extension. This is where both public and private universities have to come forward together. Many good academics in public and private universities are publishing in international journals and doing wonderful researches without patronage from their own universities. There are also wonderful teachers in public and private universities who are teaching for the love of the profession without caring much for any personal benefit.

Universities in Bangladesh have the potential to specialize and expand graduate teaching through research. With guidance and assistance from the state or generous citizens and other philanthropic institutions, universities in Bangladesh can expand their MPhil and Ph.D. programs. With some initiatives, it is very much possible for universities to develop link programs with universities outside Bangladesh. This can address the brain drain problem and also save resources that would have been spent elsewhere.

The higher education system, today, is not only a window of opportunity at the individual level, but also has strategic implications for national growth. The UGC’s 20-year strategic plan for higher education in Bangladesh says that at least 28 new universities will have to be established to raise the capacity. to the optimum level. Hopefully, this will serve to invigorate strategy development and ease the issues highlighted with resolve. The higher education institutions (HEIs) in Bangladesh will continue to face numerous challenges in the coming days, which include the issues of quality, access, cost, capacity, consistency, and so on. To meet these challenges, there is a critical need to develop coherent, comprehensive, and socially responsive strategies to make higher education more relevant, rigorous, and proactive indeed.

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Glasses Improve Income, Not Just Eyesight

A study found that when older workers in Bangladesh were given free reading glasses, they earned 33 percent more than those who had not.

By Andrew Jacobs

If you’re 50 or older and reading this article, chances are you are wearing a pair of inexpensive reading glasses to correct your presbyopia, the age-related decline in vision that makes it progressively more difficult to see fine print and tiny objects.

Eventually, nearly everyone gets the condition.

But for nearly a billion people in the developing world, reading glasses are a luxury that many cannot afford. According to the World Health Organization, the lack of access to corrective eyewear inhibits learning among young students, increases the likelihood of traffic accidents and forces millions of middle-age factory workers and farmers to leave the work force too early.

Uncorrected presbyopia, not surprisingly, makes it harder for breadwinners to support their families. That’s the conclusion of a new study which found that garment workers, artisans and tailors in Bangladesh who were provided with free reading glasses experienced a 33 percent increase in income compared to those who were not given glasses.

A normal part of aging, presbyopia occurs when the eye becomes increasingly rigid, making it harder to focus on nearby objects.

The study, published on Wednesday in the journal PLOS One, included more than 800 adults in rural Bangladesh, many of whom work in jobs that require intense attention to detail. Half of the participants — a mix of tea pickers, weavers and seamstresses between 35 and 65 — were randomly chosen to receive a free pair of reading glasses. The others were not given glasses.

Researchers followed up eight months later and found that the group with glasses had experienced a significant bump in income, receiving an average monthly income of $47.10, compared to $35.30 for the participants who did not have glasses.

The study subjects were evenly divided between male and female, and slightly more than a third were literate.

Dr. Nathan Congdon, the study’s lead author and an ophthalmologist at Queen’s University Belfast in Northern Ireland, said the results added to a mounting body of evidence that quantifies the economic impact of uncorrected vision in parts of the world where the roughly $1.50 it costs to buy a pair of so-called readers is out of reach for many.

“All of us would be happy with a 33 percent jump in income,” said Dr. Congdon, who specializes in low-cost models of eye care delivery. “But what makes the results especially exciting is the potential to convince governments that vision care interventions are as inexpensive, cost effective and life-changing as anything else that we can offer in health care.”

Dr. David S. Friedman, a professor of ophthalmology at Harvard Medical School who was not involved with the study, said he was struck by the results and hoped future studies would confirm the findings. “These economic impacts are large, real and could have a substantial impact on people’s lives,” he said.

Eye care has long been the neglected stepchild of public health in the developing world; infectious diseases like tuberculosis, malaria and AIDS tend to draw more robust government and philanthropic support. But vision impairment is a serious global issue, with a projected cost of more than $400 billion in lost productivity , according to the W.H.O.

Experts say spending on eye care can have a considerable impact on communities, both in terms of increased economic output and improved quality of life. Compared to other, more intractable health problems, addressing presbyopia is fairly inexpensive. Glasses can often be produced for less than $2 a pair, and fittings are usually carried out by community workers who can be trained in just a day.

Misha Mahjabeen, the Bangladesh country director for VisionSpring , which along with another nonprofit organization, BRAC , participated in the study, said a lack of resources was just one impediment to the increased distribution of reading glasses. In many Bangladeshi villages, she said, community workers must contend with the social stigma associated with wearing glasses, especially for women.

Overall, the health needs of women in Bangladesh take a back seat to those of men. “In our male-dominated society, when the man has a problem, it requires immediate attention, but women, they can wait,” she said.

But the effects of declining vision can be especially pronounced for women, who are often responsible for earning extra income for their families in addition to the child care and household chores, Ms. Mahjabeen said. “When it takes longer to sew and clean, or you can’t pick out all the stones from the rice, in some households it results in domestic violence,” she said.

VisionSpring distributes more than two million pairs of glasses a year throughout South Asia and Africa, up from 300,000 in 2018.

The study in PLOS One builds on previous research involving tea pickers in India that found a significant jump in productivity among study participants given reading glasses. The paper, a randomized study published in The Lancet Global Health in 2018, documented a 22-percent increase in productivity among workers who had been given glasses. For those over 50, productivity increased by nearly 32 percent.

Agad Ali, 57, a Bangladeshi tailor in the town of Manikganj, was among those who received a pair of glasses as part of the study that was published this week. In an interview conducted by a community health worker and sent via email, he described how worsening presbyopia had made it increasingly hard to thread needles and stitch clothing, adding to the time required to finish each tailoring job. Over time, he said, some customers went elsewhere, and his income began to decline. “It made me feel very helpless,” he said.

Since receiving the glasses, he said, his income had doubled. “These glasses are like my lifeline,” he told the community health worker. “I could not do my job without them.”

An earlier version of this article mischaracterized an eyesight condition, presbyopia, as farsightedness. People with presbyopia, including those who are farsighted, can’t see things up close.

How we handle corrections

Andrew Jacobs is a Times reporter focused on how healthcare policy, politics and corporate interests affect people’s lives. More about Andrew Jacobs