What’s the rationale behind establishing 600 Model Schools & Colleges?

Whenever any government assumes office, it wants to do something exceptional in the established fields without giving a second thought to those fields whether they really need the changes.

That’s why the exceptional thoughts sometimes appear as absurd. Some impractical proposals rather raise questions whether the decision makers try to do those things because of over excitement or being guided by something else.

It is learnt from the media that the government is going to establish 600 Model Schools & Colleges across the country with a view to catering to the needs of model education for the students living in backward areas of the country.

It ethereally sounds good but does it practically sound? They add that these institutions will serve as ‘Centers of Excellence’ to provide high-quality education to talented children from low- and limited-income families. Can this lame argument satisfy us really?

We fail to think that the country is losing arable land due to industrialization, human habitation, expansion of markets and other social institutions with the increase of population as well as people’s ‘increasing income that influences them to establish separate and sophisticated houses killing the fertile and agricultural land around the country ultimately squeezing our cultivable land and influencing climate change indirectly. It is really difficult to save our arable land due to controlled and uncontrolled aggressions.

We think the leaders of the country in general and particularly those in power need to give genuine attention to all the serious concerns and matters of the country. Establishing 600 institutions each on three acres of land each means a huge amount of land will be utilized for that purpose.

Does it mean to give proper education to the children? There are many institutions in the country both in the government and private sector having a good amount of land lying unused.

It is the responsibility of the ministry to identify those unutilized or less utilized land to accommodate more departments extending student and teacher facilities. That should be the ministry’s and governments’ concern.

When new institutions will be established, what will happen to the old establishments? Can we really afford to implement the project costing 68 thousand 442 crore taka?

This year about half of the HSC candidates did not sit for the exam. We will never try to learn its causes as we don’t think it to be a problem of education. The teachers teaching here may be one third are capable enough to continue this job.

What about others? Students don’t come to the class regularly and it happens mostly in government institutions. We don’t think it is a problem. Students don’t learn their subjects; they stand at the last stage of acquiring skills. We don’t think it to be a problem.

Traditional questions are set in the examinations year after year without assessing students’ real progress resulting in their inability to satisfy the market demand even though they have big certificates.

DSHE’s own research indicates that students are failing to achieve desired proficiencies in English, mathematics and even Bengali, a crisis driven by the fact that over 18 per cent of teaching posts in existing government secondary schools currently sit vacant.

Because of this lack of proper classroom instruction, students are increasingly forced to depend on commercial coaching and private tutoring, a reality reflected in UNESCO data which reveals that parents have to bear 71 per cent of total education costs.

Therefore, instead of focusing solely on isolated megaprojects, the education administration must prioritize the best use of limited government resources by simultaneously improving the quality of existing primary, secondary and higher secondary schools, resolving the teacher shortage and eliminating widespread learning gaps.

We have 702 government secondary schools in which 383 positions of head teachers remain vacant. Similar is the case with government primary schools (around 66000) where almost half of the institutions go without head teachers and it has become a constant affair due to retirement and transfer. However, we don’t have any sound policy to address this problem.

We are just talking about government run institutions but the non-government ones which accommodate the largest portion of students see even more miserable situations that we hardly talk and discuss.

So, before a final decision is made to establish these new institutions, the government must deeply evaluate long-term operational costs, teacher recruitment capacities and the structural failures of previous projects, aiming to ensure that these new residential model schools and colleges are integrated into a sustainable, holistic framework capable of bringing a truly revolutionary transformation to the country’s education system.

We don’t hesitate to express the fact that when it will be run by the state, it surely means witnessing mismanagement and putting the students far away from the desired goals and objectives of education as our experiences say.

Ministry people always show huge interest in new projects and they always try to convince the government to take new projects.

They hardly show any genuine feeling for the country, closing their eyes towards the real and genuine problems of the country.

If they had, how would they propose such an ambitious and white elephant like project? We have enough and very practical experiences that when the government wants to manage these things, they are sure to produce frustrating situations.

As the government and the ministry and our government office culture never talk about any disciplined and patriotic feeling. They talk otherwise! We are sorry to repeat it.

If the government wants to really extend cadet college types education , it must surrender the responsibility to the cadet college authorities which are still treated as disciplined institutions though many wanted to create chaos there, they could not become fully successful to do it.

This massive project aims to create government-level ‘Centres of Excellence’ that will grant talented children from low- and limited-income families unprecedented opportunities for intellectual development.

This is not a convincing explanation! If the government really wants to do something positive for the talented students, they have other means to do.

Suppose, nationalizing the schools and colleges of the remotest areas of the country and giving double salary to the teachers who will be working there can be a better solution to extend a sound education atmosphere for the backward and hard-to-reach area students.

We, however, see the reverse step of the government to nationalize educational institutions. It nationalizes urban, upazila level and better intuitions which goes contradictory to the idea placed before us for constructing 600Model Institutions.

(The writer: President- English Teachers’ Association of Bangladesh- ETAB. Former faculty member of Ghatail Cantonment College, Sylhet, Cumilla and Mirzapur Cadet College, Rajuk Uttara Model College, BOU, Education Expert- BRAC Education and Country Director- VAB Bangladesh)