Child-centred educational reforms

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Any agenda for educational reform must start by recognising that children belong to a special category of the population because they cannot protect their own rights.
Children must be warmly hugged by the state in respect of all their needs, namely health and nutrition, safety, security, and education. Significant reforms in governance are required to ensure that the efforts to be made by different departments come together. This is not easy, but there is no alternative to evolving a child-centred system of governance so that Bangladesh stops wasting its huge human resource potential on account of malnutrition, illiteracy, and child abuse. With widespread low haemoglobin levels and frequent illness, especially among girls, Bangladesh cannot compete with its neighbours like India and China, let alone the Europeans and the Americans.
While no one can deny the government's role in setting policy goals and providing funds for systemic reform, we can hardly overlook the lack of rigour and accountability in the states' response to policy directions. National-level issues of educational governance are ignored by the media as well as by civil society groups. A vast number of systemic problems simply never get resolved. There should be a greater focus on the delivery of child-related services and there should simultaneously be greater efficiency in the delivery of such services.
Gopal Sengupta
Canada
gopalsengupta@aol.com