Why Bangladesh Trails in Free Education
H. M. Nazmul Alam :
Education is often described as the great equaliser, the ladder that allows societies to climb out of poverty, inequality and stagnation.
In global forums, it is spoken of with reverence, framed as a fundamental human right and a prerequisite for sustainable development.
Bangladesh, like 192 other countries, committed itself to this vision when it adopted the Sustainable Development Goals in 2015, pledging to ensure inclusive, equitable and quality education for all by 2030.
Yet nearly a decade later, the gap between commitment and reality has become too wide to ignore.
At the heart of SDG 4 lies a simple but transformative promise: that all children will complete free and quality primary and secondary education. In Bangladesh, this promise remains only partially fulfilled.
Free and compulsory education ends at grade five, a limit that feels increasingly indefensible in a country that aspires to middle income and developed status.
In regional and global comparisons, Bangladesh now stands uncomfortably close to the bottom, not because others are racing ahead, but because we have chosen to stand still.
Across South and Central Asia, free education has steadily expanded through legal frameworks.
Several countries guarantee free schooling up to grade twelve, others up to grade ten or eight.
Even nations with far weaker economic indicators than Bangladesh have extended the state’s responsibility well beyond primary education.
Bangladesh, by contrast, remains confined to grades one to five, placing it among a small handful of countries globally with such a narrow definition of free education.
This is not merely a technical distinction. It is a structural barrier that shapes who stays in school and who is quietly pushed out.
The same inertia defines compulsory education. Globally, more than 150 countries mandate schooling up to at least grade eight.
Within South Asia, most countries have moved in that direction, recognising that basic literacy and numeracy are no longer sufficient in modern economies.
Bangladesh’s compulsory education law, enacted in 1990, still stops at grade five.
Three decades on, the law has not evolved, even as the demands on young people have multiplied.
The result is predictable. Secondary education becomes a financial gamble for families, not a guaranteed public good.
This policy choice has consequences that are visible in national statistics. Dropout rates soar at the secondary level, where costs rise sharply and state protection recedes.
While primary dropout rates remain below 15 percent, more than a third of students leave school during secondary education. The rates are even higher in madrasas and alarmingly significant in technical streams.
These numbers are not abstract. They represent millions of interrupted lives, truncated ambitions and wasted potential.
Behind these dropouts lies a financing structure that shifts the burden from the state to households.
Around 70 percent of secondary education expenditure in Bangladesh is borne by families.
Fees, private coaching, exam costs, uniforms, transport and informal payments accumulate into sums that are unsustainable for low and middle income households.
When education becomes a consumer good rather than a public service, inequality ceases to be an unfortunate byproduct and becomes a built-in feature.
The dominance of private institutions at the secondary and higher secondary levels deepens this divide.
More than 90 percent of secondary schools and colleges are privately run. Public institutions are few, oversubscribed and unevenly distributed.
While some private institutions receive government support through salary subventions, this assistance rarely translates into meaningful relief for students.
The system effectively socialises responsibility while privatising cost, leaving families to bridge the gap.
What makes this situation more troubling is that Bangladesh’s own constitution recognised the importance of free and compulsory education more than fifty years ago.
The constitutional commitment to mass oriented and universal education was meant to guide state policy toward equity and inclusion.
Yet education was placed among directive principles rather than enforceable fundamental rights.
This single constitutional choice has had long shadows. Without legal enforceability, education policy has remained vulnerable to political cycles, fiscal caution and bureaucratic delay.
Citizens cannot demand education as a right; they can only appeal to the goodwill of the state.
Recent moments of political upheaval and reform offered a rare opportunity to correct this historic omission. Commissions were formed, amendments discussed, and institutional reforms promised.
Education, however, remained conspicuously absent from the centre of these conversations.
No dedicated reform body was created, no bold constitutional proposal emerged, and no clear roadmap was articulated.
In a country where students have repeatedly stood at the forefront of democratic movements, the marginalisation of education reform is not just ironic, it is deeply unsettling.
The cost of this neglect extends beyond individual hardship. An education system that filters students by income rather than ability undermines social cohesion and economic progress.
It entrenches class divisions, limits social mobility and constrains the development of a skilled workforce.
Bangladesh’s demographic dividend, often cited as a national advantage, cannot be realised if a significant portion of young people are denied sustained schooling.
Support programmes and stipends do exist, and they have undoubtedly helped many students remain enrolled.
Free textbooks, targeted scholarships and education assistance schemes offer important relief. Yet these measures operate as patches on a structurally flawed system.
They cannot substitute for a universal guarantee of free and compulsory education up to a meaningful level.
Assistance programmes are selective, bureaucratic and often vulnerable to exclusion errors. A rights based framework, by contrast, is universal, predictable and transformative.
Bangladesh has made progress in education over the past decades, particularly in enrolment and gender parity at the primary level.
These achievements deserve recognition. But progress in one phase of education cannot justify stagnation in the next.
A system that delivers children to the gates of secondary school and then withdraws support halfway is not a success story; it is an unfinished project.
As the 2030 deadline for the Sustainable Development Goals approaches, the question is no longer whether Bangladesh values education rhetorically.
The question is whether it is willing to treat education as a right rather than a favour, an investment rather than an expense.
Expanding free and compulsory education at least to grade eight would be a modest but decisive step, aligning constitutional ideals, global commitments and social realities.
Education shapes the kind of society a nation becomes. By narrowing access, Bangladesh risks reproducing inequality across generations.
By expanding it, the country can turn a long standing promise into a lived reality. The choice is not merely technical or financial. It is moral, political and profoundly consequential.
(The writer is an Academic, Journalist, and Political Analyst based in Dhaka, Bangladesh. Currently he teaches at IUBAT. He can be reached at [email protected]))