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Education and some questions
I sighed as I read Nabilah Khan's cry for a 'unified education system'. I have heard it for 40 years in the UK and now here!
Some people are convinced that having different systems of education are to blame for poor education. They imagine that, if all the differences between schools were ironed out, then all schools would, miraculously, become uniformly good. But, as the song says, “It ain't necessarily so....”
I remember a conversation years ago in the UK, with a Christian minister who was involved in religious education, as I was -and I asked him about it. He growled, "There is good education and bad education. What is religious education?” Whether pupils attend a madrassah, a Bengali-medium or an English-medium school, they should surely learn the two things that Ms Khan thinks are essential - mutual respect and cooperation between the wide variety of people in Bangladesh and the inspiration and skills to be good leaders to ensure its political peace. But if, any school
of any system fails to do that, it should be closed and the staff re-appointed on the grounds that those in the system are failing its best principles! Ms Khan implies that just because schools are different, that education is 'broken' - but why should that follow?
It is not systems that make education inspiring and effective it is people! Again and again, it is good leadership - the quality of the Head, the backing he or she gets from the Management and, as Suranjit Debnath's later article reveals, the support of the parents and the whole community.
There are excellent schools and lousy schools in every system. There are religious schools (in all religions) who somehow manage to turn their pupils against religion for the rest of their lives. There are impoverished village schools with dedicated staff that are beacons of intellectual activity and blessings for a whole area and others that are a disgrace. There are doubtless English-medium schools that train their pupils to
turn up their noses at their language and culture (although I have to confess, I have not come across any) and others, like my own, which fiercely insist on a full participation in both as part of 'serving the nation' which is its motto.
What is a good education is as hard to nail down as mercury. God protect us from those who think that having a single, nice, tidy system for something as riotously creative as education, will effect anything but an enormous hole in the budget. Whatever the system, accountability (somehow freed from bribery and corruption) has to be improved yes but, in my experience and, I am sure, that of many others, uniformity has never been the answer to failure of quality.
Angela Robinson (Rev Mrs) MA Dip Ed (Oxon)
Head of Girls' Section
Bangladesh International Tutorial Gulshan 2, Dhaka