There is a particular condition that afflicts policymakers in developing democracies, and Bangladesh’s education sector establishment has a textbook example for it. A video was recently circulated on social media showing the education minister stepping out of a car in a village, a microphone clipped to his collar, and posing a question to a group of schoolchildren with theatrical flair: “There will be no more cheating in exams. You are studying properly, aren’t you?”

When a minister’s primary talking point—at field visits, board meetings, and education seminars—is exam hall discipline, what does that tell us about the ceiling of our ambitions?

The fact that the minister considers plagiarism prevention a selling point announces, loudly and without irony, that we have set the bar for reform at administrative adequacy. The minister’s agenda reads like a checklist of procedural anxieties: preventing cheating in exam halls, drafting new legislation to criminalise digital fraud in examinations, and overhauling how answer scripts are evaluated and marked. These are not unimportant matters, but obsessing over how strictly we mark a test tells us nothing about whether the test is worth taking. Criminalising digital cheating does not produce a single curious, capable, or creative mind.

Compare this with what policymakers in high-performing education systems actually discuss. In Finland, South Korea, or Singapore, the national conversation in education circles revolves around cultivating creativity, building research capacity, redesigning curricula to address 21st-century skills, and preparing students for labour markets that will look radically different in 20 years. Bangladesh, meanwhile, remains imprisoned in a conversation about exam centres and grade sheets. And this is not simply our minister’s personal failing. It is a structural one, rooted in how our political economy works.

When a party comes to power with a five-year mandate, its core incentive is to produce visible wins before the next ballot. A shiny new school building can be photographed. Distributing devices to thousands of students generates a front-page headline and gives the impression of a country going digital overnight. But no one can photograph the improving quality of a lesson.

The new policy announcements popping up in recent months—mandatory third languages and vocational training—follow exactly this pattern. They are presented as forward-thinking reforms, but without the foundational structural work that any serious curricular overhaul requires: teacher retraining at scale, assessment reform, coherent implementation frameworks, and a willingness to sit with complexity for years before results arrive.

The tablets would be distributed; whether teachers could use them, whether the curriculum would be compatible with digital learning, whether students in those schools even would have reliable electricity—these questions often dissolve into the background. The GPA-5 count swells year on year, pass rates reach improbable heights, and yet we continue producing graduates who are uncompetitive in the global workforce.

The real tragedy is that the reforms which could actually matter are obvious and achievable. Teacher dignity is one of them. In countries where education works, the teaching profession carries social prestige and financial security. In Bangladesh, we have systematically undermined both. A teacher who is poorly paid, professionally unsupported, and socially marginalised is not going to transform classrooms no matter how many syllabi we redesign above their heads.

The curriculum problem is similarly neglected. We live in an era of rapid technological disruption, where artificial intelligence is reshaping white-collar work, where the skills that will matter most to today’s schoolchildren are adaptability, critical reasoning, and comfort with ambiguity. Instead, our curriculum asks students to remember, reproduce, perform at narrow cognitive tasks under timed pressure. The result is young people who are literate on paper but practically unprepared for the world ahead.

Our policymakers know this. The problem is that fixing it takes a decade, requires political courage, and none of it promises an easy win. It requires a government to trust that doing the right, unglamorous thing today will matter enormously to a generation of children who cannot yet vote. We must be clear about what we are asking for: the boring, difficult, unphotographable work of building a real education system.

A nation’s true development is measured by the depth of its people’s thinking. Our ministers can choose to be remembered as the generation that fixed exam hall conduct, or as the generation that finally decided to build something that lasts. So far, they are choosing the wrong thing to be proud of.

A longer version of this article is available on our website.