Maswood Alam Khan
This year, like in the previous years, thousands of students from different secondary schools have passed their SSC examinations with stupendous results. It has been reported that the percentage of students who have passed in this year's SSC examinations from all the ten education boards of Bangladesh has broken all the previous records. This is a piece of great news indeed and we have reasons to believe that our boys and girls are now fully conscious that there is no alternative to education and the secondary school certificate is their pride possession and their first permit to climb the ladder up to higher education.
It has been proven that those who get good grades in both SSC and HSC examinations can ultimately matriculate to a good university. If we try to find out why our students are faring so well in SSC and HSC examinations it will transpire that it was more the students' and their guardians' determination and perseverance than the quality of classroom lessons or the dedication of school teachers or private tutors that propelled our boys and girls to attain good results in their examinations.
Of course, there were a good number of good schools and colleges where quality education was imparted to students by qualified teachers. But their numbers are now fast dwindling away. Even schools and colleges which were traditionally reputed to be the best few in the country are no more staffed by dedicated teachers.
There are quality teachers who are in the payroll of those famous schools and colleges, but they dispense knowledge to students on a piecemeal approach by offering classroom lessons in such a manner that the students feel impelled to enroll themselves as pupils under those teachers' private tuition to fill up the gaps of knowledge left unfilled in their classrooms. Classroom lectures of those teachers are the advertisements for their tutorial businesses. A good college is an attractive avenue for those teachers to monetize the gathering of prospective clients. Lectures in classes are their giveaways to lure the gullible students into buying knowledge on sale the way freebies are offered to hook customers into buying merchandises on display in the markets.
Such a scenario is prevalent not only in Bangladesh but also in other developing countries in the world. Selling knowledge is nowadays a multibillion or a multitrillion dollar business not only in developing countries like Bangladesh but also in developed countries like the United States of America. But there is a difference between how students are taught in the classrooms in Bangladesh and in America.
In most of the American schools and colleges the students are very powerful as they pay money for their tuition and the tuition fees are pretty high here. Teachers remain alert to the possibility of losing their jobs in case the students are not satisfied with the way lessons are taught in the classrooms. Each and every student is required to submit their evaluations of his or her teacher on every single class lesson taught in the classrooms.
Bad evaluations by students about a teacher in America means earning bad points on the part of the teacher the way an American motorist earns bad points for each violation of traffic rules. While each traffic violation is not in itself serious enough to require suspension or revocation of your driver's license, several violations may indicate that action has to be taken. If a certain number of bad points is reached within a prescribed amount of time, your driver's license may be suspended or even revoked. Similarly, if students continue submitting bad evaluations about your teaching patterns your privilege to teach in a school may also be suspended or even revoked.
But in Bangladesh students are too weak to fight against their teachers. Students in Bangladesh are required to keep mum when they don't understand what their teacher is babbling away on Mathematics or on any other subject in the classrooms. In Bangladesh, it is the teachers who decide the fate of their students depending not on who is attentive in the classrooms but on who is enrolled as a student of those teachers' private tuition sessions in the afternoon or at night.
Guardians of this year's SSC examinees who secured good results, especially of those examinees who got GPA-5, are happy at their wards' academic accomplishments, no doubt but they must at the same time be passing dreadful moments, worrying over whether they could get their wards admitted in reputed colleges given that the number of eligible candidates will far outweigh the number of seats available in those famous colleges.
Should a guardian feel disgruntled at the failure of his or her ward's getting admission in a college like Dhaka College or Holy Cross College? Should not the guardians be smart enough to find an alternative method in which their wards could prepare themselves for higher secondary certificate and fare equally well in HSC examinations the way they did in SSC examinations? Should not our government take steps to redress the problem by introducing an effective alternative system for those meritorious students who for no fault of their own would not get admission in the so-called reputed colleges?
We should bear in mind that it is no more, or not necessarily, the reputation of a school or a college or its teachers that are responsible for the stupendous results of our boys and girls in SSC or HSC, it is the students' and their guardians' determination and perseverance that have made students excel in their academic pursuits. Students in Vikarunnessa School, Dhaka College, Notre Dame College or Holy Cross College showed stupendous results in their exams not for the signboards of the institutions but for the intrinsic quality of the students themselves. If today all the students of the so-called famous colleges collectively decide that they would study from the comfort of their homes taking help from online courses the dominance of the greedy teachers will die soon and the business monopoly of the educational institutions would be vanished too.
Even in America there is a system of homeschooling which is also known as home education or home learning in which children are educated at home, typically by parents but sometimes by tutors too, rather than in other formal settings of public or private schools. In fact, prior to the introduction of compulsory school attendance, most education, especially the childhood education, occurred within the family or community. Homeschooling in the modern sense is an alternative to expensive private schooling run on commercial considerations.
What is needed today in Bangladesh for emancipating our students from the shackles of oppressive and expensive education systems is free or concessional access into internet by all our young students. Here, the government and the nongovernment organizations can play their pivotal roles. In this age of information technology, if our students can get lessons from free educational websites like those of "Khan Academy" in English or from that of AGAMI, the Bangla counterpart of "Khan Academy", the guardians may rest assured that their wards who would fail to get admissions into so-called reputed colleges will not lag behind their classmates who would ostensibly be luckier in getting admission into colleges of their choices.
It may be mentioned that AGAMI, a US-based nonprofit organization run by some IT professionals based in California, has almost completed the job of translating the "Khan Academy" tutorials in English into Bangla for all the Science playlists on Physics, Chemistry, Biology and Organic Chemistry. Now it is up to the Bangla spoken students and learners in Bangladesh to make the best use of it by visiting the websites of Khan Academy and AGAMI or by clicking the related YouTube: http://www.youtube.com/KhanAcademyBangla.
I wonder how Rabindranath Tagore, had he been alive today, would react to the hapless situations of our students eager to get admissions into famous colleges, but miserably failing!
Rabindranath Tagore believed in absolute freedom in education he found his outside formal schooling to be inferior and boring and, after a brief exposure to several schools, he refused to attend school. The only degrees he ever received were honorary ones bestowed late in his life. As an alternative to the then existing forms of education, he started a small school at Shantiniketan in 1901 that developed into a university and rural reconstruction centre, where he tried to develop an alternative model of education that stemmed from his own learning experiences.
Had Rabindranath Tagore been alive today, he would perhaps initiated a worldwide campaign to stop the commercialization of education and set up a global NGO which would organize distributing educational materials and knowhow absolutely for free through internet.
From Maryland, USA. The writer can be connected via maswood@hotmail.com
