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Arresting primary school drop-out

The present government has made private tuition and guides/notebooks illegal, but they are continuing as widely as before. It is impossible to stop this practice of private tuition/coaching, and writing and publishing of guidebooks as long as the homework system exists in schools.

Alamgir Khan
system; the rest, children from poor families, usually cannot perform well and so fail and fall back.
It is now necessary to stop giving homework in schools, but this is a gigantic task requiring overhauling of the whole education system. Not wanting to wait till that golden change comes about, a national NGO has been determined to address this situation in a new way, which gives giving children from poor families a chance to stay in the march, a window for breathing in a relentless competitive environment, something to hold on to so they do not drop out. It means 2 hours of learning and preparation of the homework given in school, with a local girl working as a teacher for this period. However, it is still confined among children of pre-primary, Class 1 and Class 2. The concept of 1 teacher for 30 children in 1 room promoted by Brae is used here, too. But these are not schools like Brae's, rather a social programme to support mainstream schools.
The teacher joins the programme for Tk.500 month from the NGO and takes Tk.20-30 from each learner; that makes it around Tk.1,200 a month for her. In about 2,500 schools, for 60,000 learners, the organisation spends Tk.2 crore, and the parents of these children spend another Tk. 1-1.5 crore every year. This contribution by parents makes it a social programme and the NGO intends to turn it into a social movement. Other NGOs also have started replicating the programme.
Almost all learners in these schools pass the exams successfully and some from poor families secure the top places in the class. Besides completion of their homework, extra-curricular activities like singing, dancing, recitation, telling jokes, etc. comprise their learning period. Researchers who conducted a study (Arresting Primary School Dropout, published by CDIP, 2011) on these schools found that local people said that if the support were withdrawn, they would keep the wheels of their learning centres turning with their own resources.
This is what makes the effort of arresting primary school dropout a potential to be turned into a social movement, independent of outside support.
The writer Is Research and Publication Officer at Centre for Development Innovation and Practices (CDIP).
DROPOUT from school is the major barrier in eradicating illiteracy in Bangladesh. The enrolment rate is now a hundred percent, but half the enrolled learners drop out of education before completing the primary cycle. There have been a lot of government and non-government efforts to stop this dropout. Midday meal in school, Reaching Out-of-School Children (ROSC) Project etc. are but a few.
There are many reasons for this dropout, but the central one is poverty. Poverty would not have been a problem for learning if education were free, which it is not, contrary to what has existed on paper since 1990. Every parent knows how free primary education is in this country! There are thousands of loopholes to make it a very un-free primary education. To know a few of the loopholes one has to look at any study report conducted by any person or organisation anywhere in the country. Some of these are poverty, lack of food in schools, lack of uniforms for school students, necessity of assisting the breadearner in the family, to name but a few.
Beyond this, one of the reasons for dropout that usually remains unnoticed to most researchers is the workload given in classrooms to students for learning at home, known as homework. In schools across South-Asian countries, teachers give students a lot of homework, ask them to learn these at