Quality education for egalitarian society

The best way to help a poor person is to help him/her in educating his/her sons and daughters. Those days of ration cards through which the poor people used to have access to cheap food are no longer there. The market forces are now determining the prices of everything from labour to food, education to all other things one needs in society. Market generates competition and the poor and disadvantaged groups in society are unable to compete against the rich and privileged as they are not on equal footing. The people left behind, if not otherwise helped by the state, in all probability will fall further behind.
The increasing divide between the haves and the have-nots, if not stopped by an active programme of the state, will one day lead to serious unrest in society which will ultimately thwart social progress and also economic expansion. Many independent voluntary organisations like Oxfam have raised a loud voice against income inequalities across the world and argued fervently that if inequality is not stopped, the social and economic progress will give in to disorder leading to a mess for everyone living in those societies. They point out that, more than 50 per cent of the world's wealth will be owned by the richest 1.0 per cent of the people in the next two years. They fear that the situation will become more acute in the coming years, if not stopped by active state intervention.
In Bangladesh, too, though poverty level has gone down significantly, income inequality has sharpened over the years. The main reason for the increasing gap between the rich and the poor is that a few took advantage of authoritarian politics in the country and positioned themselves either in power or near the bastion of power. Very few people could have become startlingly rich without being close to power, which is normally wielded by the people who are a direct functionary of the government or have close alliance with it.  Corruption and state power are the twin factors that are putting some people ahead of others in terms of capacity of amassing wealth.
There is little chance for one to become rich in Bangladesh with only education and hard labour. Education, especially quality education, has become also costly. Apparently, education in Bangladesh is cheap as there are no fees charged for it in government-run schools and colleges, but in practice it is costly when the cost of tuition charged by private tutors outside the classrooms is taken into account. Education without private coaching is unthinkable today. And also the poor people's wards are compelled to have education in the Bangla-medium syllabus which is overburdened with too many textbooks and too many exams.
Public examinations have been brought down to the primary school level which is nothing but torturing the school-going students below 10 years or so in the name of sitting for examinations. Too many textbooks are to be read and too many exams are to be faced by the Bangla-medium students at every stage of schooling. True, more and more students are going for education in the country's schools, colleges and universities, but unfortunately, most of them are receiving poor quality education.
Education at the primary level prepare the students poorly to meet the demand of quality education at the college level. College level education again fails to impart right kind of education to help out students to accept challenges at the university level.
And when university graduates are out in the job markets they are found to be not suitable for job or employment. The main stumbling block in the way of quality education is the lack of knowledge in English language among the students. The students graduating from the Bangla-medium schools are finding it difficult to compete with the English-medium graduates in job markets.
Another aspect of education is the sheer neglect of technical education. Technical education at the low level is anathema to students and guardians alike. They are after soft academic degrees in humanities and business. Last few years saw an unparalleled growth of academic degrees with business. Every private university in its inception started with the Bachelor of Business Administration Programme and there is no shortage of students in this programme whereas polytechnic institutes at the district level are going without students. The rich guardians send their wards to the English-medium schools for O-level and A-level certificates. There is a huge demand for English-medium education among the rich people, but this education is out of the reach of the poor simply because of high cost.
The gap in quality of education can be bridged, to an extent, if the government can ensure quality education in the Bangla-medium schools. Unfortunately, our education system is producing a condition of inequality in society. Two educated persons even with the same degrees are not equal simply because two degrees are not from the same type of academic institutions or are not based on the same type of syllabus. Imparting quality education to all students is one way of estyablishing an egalitarian society.
Market economy has a tendency of making the rich more rich but quality education, if available to all, can bridge the divide, at least to some extent.
There was a time when the state funded the education of meritorious students in full, but those days are no more with us. Now so-called good students are either to depend on their parents or on their tuition for funding their education. Science education is no more attractive to students. Subjects like physics and chemistry are failing to draw good students to these departments. In case of science education, the government needs to give more attention with funds for research and scholarship for students.

The writer is Professor of Economics, University of Dhaka.  abuahmedecon@yahoo.com