Masum Billah :
DC Conference 2024 took place between 3 March and 6 March 2024 marking one day longer than the previous ones.
This year’s conference saw 356 proposals given by the divisional commissioners and deputy commissioners that saw the highest number of proposals from the roads and highway departments numbering 22.
The DC Conference 2023 registered total 245 proposals. DCs and divisional commissioners placed the proposal on the basis of their experiences gathered while running the administrative and its relative activities.
However, most of these proposals belong to the line of extending their power and dominating their areas of work.
This year’s conference also did not see any exception. One thing was added to the conference which seems to be a new initiative and that is the retired cabinet secretaries were invited to share their experiences and put forward some advices as well.
This year’s conference hosted 30 sessions—seven sessions on the very first day, nine sessions on the second day, seven on third day and another seven on the last day.
No doubt, many national issues took the center stage of the discussions though education, which is definitely one of the most vital issues of the nation, did not occupy the center stage with many proposals.
We introduced a new curriculum titled ‘competency-based curriculum’ in January 2023 which is quite new in our national history. Hence, we expected more and more discussions in the said DC Conference as DCs are the most important players to run the field administration in the administrative set-up of the country.
I want to repeat that in the history of Bangladesh this is for the first time ‘competency based curriculum’ has been introduced since January 2023 and the approach of this curriculum is ‘ experiential learning’. Since its introduction, a flame of protest, doubt, uncertainty and particularly assessment have shrouded the entire education scene even though major players were brought under training program. Still, no such satisfactory answer and solution has been discerned.
In this important and powerful field level administrative heads’ significant conference could have raised this issue reflecting the field realities that we did not see. We expected constructive feedback, reaction and a genuine picture of our educational institutions, the situation of students, teachers and guardians. From time-to-time different print and electronic media are reporting the issue in different and scattered ways. In this conference we thought some concrete points would be discussed that truly remained absent.
It was good that the sexual harassment issue in the educational institutions was discussed. In this regard, honourable Education Minister said that if such case happens in any educational institution, law enforcing agencies will take action immediately as per the verdict of the High Court.
After such kind of incident takes that sometimes creates obstacles in the way of smoothly running the judgement and it will not be allowed.
In each institution, there must be an ‘anti- sexual harassment committee’ and already many institutions are having it. If any educational institution still does not have such a committee, they must form it soon.
Another important issue was raised that the government and non-government primary schools have witnessed the absenteeism case.
This is true in secondary level education also. Students don’t give any importance to the class since the new curriculum has been introduced. Causes are known to the teachers but there seems to be none to listen to them.
Students and guardians think that remaining in the class does not attach much importance as students don’t think that their absence will influence their promotion to next class or their evaluation which is truly not still clear to many teachers and students, let alone guardians resulting in giving their less importance to classroom teaching.
I have seen this picture in the schools of Dhaka cities, the situation of rural areas hold grimmer picture than this.
How is this case in different districts while dealing with new curriculum should have been discussed as these students are going to take the lead of the nation in near future.
We have education administration but no such critical discussion we hear from them. They just follow whatever they have been asked to do.
They must talk about the things in detail and its current status and its future course. But it is sad enough that from the people belonging to education administration we hear no such words but expected to listen something from the DC Conference that also did not happen.
It is our expectation and demand that education related discussion should receive more and more importance in such type of important conference and forum as it will show ways and benefits to all related to educational fields.
The conference accommodated some discussions a little bit about the quality of education in private universities even though the quality of tertiary level education sees no direct link with the DCs. Anyway, it was good that the point was raised. The quality and anomalies are now-a-days taking place more and more in our public universities that was not raised at all.
Teacher politics, student politics, mass room culture, tender and extortion have occupied the place of quality education and research in our public universities. Very recently we have witnessed that a medical teacher directly opened fire on one of his students in the classroom that astonished all sensible people. How this kind people become teachers in higher educational institution!
(Writer is President of English Teachers’ Association of Bangladesh (ETAB), Cell: 01714-091431, Email: [email protected])
