Primary education: Quality needed

Nobel laureate Prof Muhammad Yunus had once said, "Access to quality education has enabled me to reach far beyond the Bangladeshi village I grew up in."
But this is not true for millions of others in rural Bangladesh now.
A views-exchange in Rangpur district town the other day, as reported in the FE last Saturday, called for raising the amount of stipend money to encourage children of poor families to attend primary schools. The programme was held under the BRAC's 'Advocacy for Social Empowerment Programme and Advocacy for Social Change'.
The meeting was attended by school managing committee (SMC) members, headmasters, civil society members and elite at Dwarikapara Government Primary School under Pirganj upazila.
The speakers called for enhancing the amount of monthly sub-stipend for the primary school students. They requested SMC members, headmasters and teachers of the primary school for working with the guardians to ensure 100 per cent enrollment of the students coming from hardcore poor families and help bring the rate of dropouts to zero level.
What is the state of primary education in Bangladesh today?
In fact, primary education is like the foundation of a high-rise building. If the foundation is not laid properly with faulty structure, the entire building might one day collapse.   
Possibly, that is why Jean Jacques Rousseau, an 18th century philosopher, writer and composer, had once said: "Plants are shaped by cultivation and men by education… we are born weak, we need strength; we are born totally unprovided, we need aid; we are born stupid, we need judgment. Everything we do not have at our birth and which we need when we are grown is given to us by education."
Unfortunately, the primary schools across Bangladesh display a sorry state of the beginners' education that deserves special care from both policymakers and teachers.  
Undoubtedly, the government allocates a substantial amount in the national budget for promoting primary education. But what is the output of such an investment?
To achieve the goal of universal primary education, the government, in addition to other allocations, has been providing Taka 100 per month to every poor primary school student side by side free tiffin and free books. All these benefits are meant to ensure hundred per cent enrollment of primary school-going children.
But mere enrollment, even up to cent per cent, will not really serve the real cause of primary education.  A former primary education adviser to an erstwhile caretaker government Rasheda K Chowdhury is correct in her appraisal that the weakness of our teaching process is that it is not child-centred. Most countries first train teachers before sending them to classes. But in Bangladesh, teachers impart education to children themselves before getting the necessary training, she regretted.
In fact, the teacher-student ratio in our country is so high that it becomes impossible for teachers to go for competency-based teaching approach in classrooms. With one teacher for 60 students, on an average, it is not possible for a teacher to closely monitor the progress of individual learners.
Unfortunately, in many primary schools across Bangladesh, a teacher has to hold four to five or even more classes a day. As a result, most teachers cannot even make lesson plans for a class, let alone applying new approach in the classroom. It is time for redesigning learning tools and emphasising more classroom interaction to replace the age-old method of delivering lectures only in classrooms.
A recent World Bank (WB) report has been more precise in detecting weaknesses of our primary education system. According to its report, the teachers are so much textbook-oriented that they are hardly aware of the objectives of the curriculum. It was found that only 4 per cent Bangla teachers in government primary schools were able to correctly list all curriculum objectives while 27 per cent were unable to list any. This does not mean that teachers are not teaching what they are supposed to teach, but it does indicate that the curriculum is not well implemented at the classroom level.
In fact, the situation is alarming at the primary school level. Around 75 per cent of the fifth graders do not have adequate competence in Bangla while 67 per cent lack that in Mathematics, said a survey of the Directorate of Primary Education.
The WB findings say teaching at the lower level of education is considered to be a low-profile job as it neither offers an attractive career ladder nor a satisfactory salary.
To ensure a better learning environment at classrooms, it is time to ensure better salary and allowance for the teachers first. A field-level study has confirmed that the rate of abstention from workplace is the highest among highest paid staff of the primary schools.
The wholesale nationalisation has transformed primary schools into government entities. But the changeover has, apparently, made the teachers of these schools least accountable.  Unfortunately, though, the development is very much in line with the inertia and laxity seen in all government bodies where monthly salaries and other benefits are guaranteed to officials and employees even without any real performance on their part.
Without any change in the widely prevailed culture of abstention by the teachers, wholesale nationalisation of primary schools has made it almost impossible to fire truant teachers. Nationalisation has overburdened the education budget without solving problems of teacher absenteeism and under-performance. Lastly, it may lead to a governance crisis in the education sector. Quality is being sacrificed only for quantity. That is where primary education stands today. Badly needed now is a serious review of the primary education system and adoption of corrective measures to reverse the alarming trends.
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