Our students today are in a dire situation. It is not possible to fully realise this through research or surveys alone. They are getting promoted to higher classes without achieving the required competencies for their current level.
Parents are focused solely on exams and grades. As long as their children somehow manage to secure a GPA-5 in the final examination, they are satisfied. Many teachers, meanwhile, have strengthened their private tutoring businesses by emphasising test results over genuine learning.
Unless the structural problems of secondary education are properly identified, no immediate solution is possible. The first and foremost step must be to reform the curriculum.
Each grade and subject needs clearly defined competency levels, which the current curriculum utterly lacks. Teachers themselves often do not understand how to ensure that students actually acquire the prescribed competencies.
To address this, teacher guides should be developed, providing clear, step-by-step instructions about teachers’ responsibilities and classroom activities. At present, no such guide exists for any subject at the secondary level. Even when they did exist in the past, they were either not distributed properly or not used effectively by teachers.
If we truly want to ensure students’ subject-based proficiency, we must give greater importance to continuous assessment rather than final examinations. The traditional question-setting method must also change so that it reflects whether a student has actually achieved the desired learning outcomes.
Not all students in a classroom have the same learning gaps or weaknesses; teachers should therefore engage them in ways that promote mutual support and collaboration.
The current school report card, which focuses almost entirely on GPA and numerical grades, should be redesigned. Instead, it should include detailed evaluations of each student’s strengths and weaknesses in every subject.
There are a few more crucial steps that require attention. For example, guidebooks must be banned completely. Textbooks themselves can be made longer and more comprehensive if necessary, to meet diverse learning needs. Lessons and exercises must also be linked to real-life contexts, so that education becomes both enjoyable and relevant.
The widespread culture of coaching centres and batch tutoring among teachers must be entirely eliminated. To make this feasible, teachers’ basic salaries should be increased, along with the introduction of new financial incentives.
* Tariq Monzur, Professor, University of Dhaka
* The views expressed are the author’s own.