**English medium kindergarten education in Bangladesh has taken a predatory turn, targeting toddlers with an ever-increasing volley of textbooks, classwork and psychological demand. But will the newly emerging "More materials, more results" concent set more out of a six-year old?

THE five- year old is ' ecstatic. He has just got his report card, which has a colourful "certificate" attached to it with a "Promoted To KG 1" in blaring font. The parents too share his joy, but theirs is short-lived. Because after all the commotion has died down, they now have to confront the daunting experience of seeing their ward through the next six years — the stepping stohes to getting past the primary education rigmarole in Bangladesh. For. this is. the period that these children are battered with books, extracurricular activities, teachers and ever-demanding schools in the process of getting educated.

At present, these institutions and their activities are a gawking topic of neglect and mismanagement — a notorious sector by itself. The exasperation starts with the books and stationery list for the coming year. Actually it's more like an appendix — the fine print magically expands when you get to the bookshop (or stationery shop).

Colour World!

Nowadays, it seems the children of smaller classes, like Playgroup, Nursery and Kindergarten onwards are the targets of triggering a buying spree by hapless parents. Teachers have no hesitation in prescribing endless booklists and "educational materials" for these five to seven yeqr olds, many of whom can hardly read.

"Educational materials" include (and are mostly) stationery like marker pens (of different colours) for writing on the whiteboard, two sets (of 12 each!) of crayons for use with exercise books, an array of oil paints (complete with brushes -thin and medium!) and, in some schools, a separate set of coloured chalks for the blackboard. And that’s only one student's pack.

With some 20 to 25 children per class and a little multiplication, we have, on any typical school day. a total of something around 725 assorted colour

pens/pencils in the classroom! Worse still: many parents complain that many of these mysteriously go "missing" after several days - replacement is the only solution!

One Stop, One Price

Buying the listed items can be another headache. There is only one shop, with one branch in one area of (one!) Dhaka (in some extreme cases there also has to one specific shopkeeper!). This has become a customary practice in school-bookshop dealings (in Dhaka, most bookshops cater to stationery needs as well). Not only do guardians have to put up with the acute pricing system of the particular monopoly, they are not at liberty to choose equivalent texts from different sources.

That brings us to books.

These have contracted the stationery syndrome. One book, one edition, one publisher (and more importantly, one price). Many of the books are published in developed countries (like the U.K., U.S.A. or Canada) making them more dear than their lower-priced equivalents. But then, as the school authorities and shopkeepers alike would inform sometimes, there are no equivalent texts or cheaper editions from countries like India or Bangladesh.

Exorbitant Fees

The elevated fee'structure in English medium kindergartens (and higher classes for that matter) has long been a subject of inconclusive debate — to such an extent that we have come to accept it. Pupils can be charged as much as 900-1000 taka per month in KG 1 in schools in Dhaka. Plus there are the additional "hidden charges" that have to be satisfied every year. A school in Mohammadpur in Dhaka charged 4000 taka as "yearly" charge for a student who just got promoted to KG 1 from Nursery! When approached in a similar situation, another school in Dhanmandi admitted they took these "charges" every year to "confirm" the child's seat in the

class. If this fee was not met. the student would "have his/her name removed from the register."

This is something like getting admitted every year into the school for a new class! Records of monetary transactions are also shady in some cases. Specific "categories" of payment are deliberately left out of the pay book - some examples are Late Fee, Clubs Fund (for the different clubs in the school). Library Fee and Lab Fee. Of the last two, the library and laboratory facilities are promised long before any definite service is provided.

What's for Homework?

After Nursery, it's all work and no play. Loads of homework, hairline marking schemes and even submission deadlines! Gotta grow up fast! Today's Super Toddlers are homeworking overtime. Average tasks include three to four pages of numbers (writing one’s, two's, etc.) eight alphabets (two times each) and a poem. Deadline: on Tuesday, provided today is Sunday! A visit to Anika's (a Nursery graduate doing her KG's) house in the afternoon found her hunched over a book trying to cram some lines of "Little Miss Mullet " into her head. She had come home from school at twelve o'clock and had to finish this poem so she could study for tomorrow's "exam" in the evening.

This becomes a routine despite. schools claiming less or no homework at all. The child just has enough time for a little recreation and even this has to be adjusted to her "schedule".

How Much is Really Being Taught?

Does this cocktail of texts, homework, money and teachers enlighten the child to a satisfactory level of intellect at the end of the year? Some teachers argue that learning through variety helps a child to communicate better and respond to inputs more easily. Others stress they are following foreign curricula and techniques - just how

much of this is resembles our own education system here remains to be debated. Parents meekly point out that even though their wards are wearied with school at such an early level they have very limited options to quality primary education — they can only go with the crowd.

Conscious parents think that the training of teachers from classes IV and below (especially Nursery and KG) should be brought under scrutiny. "Teacher awareness" could become tutelage jargon in the future of our national education policy. In various developed countries, people handling infants are given lessons on psychology and child behaviour. Emphasising on such issues in primary education can naturally be shunned by poorer, partisan governments in LDC's. But if taboos are anything to go by. they are best forsaken for national progress.

And Finally...

Here the term English-medium has become synchronous with private funding and a deceptive scenario of glitzy quality education. It is high time the government intervened, to put on track a sphere of our national interest which has been badly disregarded since independence. How can standards improve if they are not actualised at the primary level? An autonomous monitoring body sponsored by the Government should be created for overlooking the development and progress of English medium institutions. Surprise on-site inspections are still a long way oil; countering certain "influences" on behalf of the owners is an issue to tackle.

Questions pop up every time we notice hesitant Education Ministry officials keeping mum on an "English-medium" problem. If this sector is given substantial priority like Bengali-medium schools, then the two "mediums" could bolster the present education system to be at par with international standards.