Education for all should be a reality, not just a catchphrase

In Bangladesh, education sector is the area which we were proud of.  There were true commitment and dedication from the government to make this area the best, if not better. In recent time, a dark shadow seems to be grasping this sector and this sector has become truly vulnerable. What is happening in this sector simply indicates the fact that ensuring quality education for all in Bangladesh is challenging.
Transparency International Bangladesh (TIB) presented a report on Bangladesh sector that shows  considerable corruption is there in this sector in Bangladesh; our government reacted hard to this report, but deep down inside we all know that truly corruption is there in this sector. Let us discuss some open facts that we know all; we have public and private institutions and without shadow of doubt the private institutions meant to be only for the people who are well off. Now when we speak about public institutions, the prevailing corruption makes it hard to ensure education for all.  Even if we talk about admission procedure for class three, we can see that many meritorious students do not get opportunity to get admitted because of the influence of some people. We know there are many quotas we follow, but there are also anomalies we envisage. And, speaking about getting admitted into public universities, we sometimes hear irregularities here that also indicates the fact that we cannot secure education for all.
The most devastating factor is this sector is encountering the leakage of question papers of various public examinations. This refers to the fact that not only our government is careless about this vital issue, but also it opens the window for some particular people who are benefited by doing this heinous activity. This is truly strange that our government cannot prevent this activity and it looks like our Education Ministry has nothing to do about it.
A student prepares for the exam for long and nothing can give such pleasure to a student when he/she performs well in the exam and gets a good result. If a good student sees that their upcoming exam question is available in various social media before the exam, nothing can be more frustrating than this. Having said this, how we can say that we have education for all?
On the other side of the coin, in private institutions, there is not such activity going on which makes us believe that it would be better for us to go to private schools or universities instead of public ones. If this is the fact, now question we can ask is: can all go to these private schools or universities? It takes  much money to get a degree from these institutions and no doubt not all people can go for it.
If we truly want to make a difference and truly want to develop our country, we need to, by any means secure education for all and for this, we need to keep our education sector free from the grasp of corruption, we need to make sure that both our public and private institutions run without any malpractice.

The writer is adjunct faculty at Independent University, Bangladesh (IUB),
[email protected]