Shawdesh Desk: The objectives set in the national curriculums for the school children have no reflection in the textbooks and the classroom activities for which the pupils fail to achieve the competencies and skills they are expected to attain at the end of the academic years.

Educationists and curriculum experts observe that the textbooks the National Curriculum and Textbook Board distributes among the schoolchildren are thus not adequate for the primary, junior, secondary and higher secondary students to become ideal citizens with a strong sense of ethics and practical  outlook to deal with the 21st century challenges.

They say that teachers just pressurise the children in the classrooms to achieve good marks against the set patterned questions in the examinations.

The teachers, they further say, do not pay attention to development among the students of a sense of humanity and human dignity and respect for others, to development of skills in reading, writing and speaking of Bangla and English languages, and competencies in mathematics as well as in other subjects or acquiring knowledge.

The reasons for this sorry state include the scarcity of quality textbook writers as well as competent teachers, lack of provision for adequate training of the teachers and other relevant professionals, absence of monitoring of the classroom activities by responsible government agencies, they point out.

Besides, the lack of coordination among the agencies concerned under the two ministries on education – the education ministry and the primary and mass education ministry – and the successive governments’ intention to show good performances in the public examinations as their achievements are also responsible for the situation, they add.

‘Over the years, one government after another have destroyed the education system with the intention of taking credits by showing good results of the pupils in the public examinations during their terms,’ Dhaka University emeritus professor Serajul Islam Chowdhury told New Age.

‘Developing the nation’s children with a strong sense of humanity and as a skilful future generation as mentioned in the curriculums now just appear as rhetoric,’ he said, adding that the flawed education system was forcing the children to grow as unskilled, unsocial and immoral beings.

The National Children Assessment Report, launched in February by the World Bank in Dhaka, reveals that 35 per cent of Class III students cannot read Bangla well while 43 per cent of them cannot give a complete answer to a question in Bangla.

Three in four class V students cannot solve mathematical problems of their class standard, the report shows.

The report titled ‘Learning to Realize Education’s Promise’ was developed based on random tests conducted among class III and class V students at 1,600 schools around the country in 2017.

But, the Primary Education Completion examination results of 2017 demonstrated that of the 26, 96, 216 students who appeared for the examinations, 25,66, 271 came out successful with 2,62,609 of them obtaining Grade Point Average -5.

BRAC University emeritus professor Manzoor Ahmed, who was involved in the national school assessment, said that the assessments of the primary school children’s skills and competencies carried out in 2011, 2013, 2015 and 2017 show a declining trend in student performances.

‘Contrarily, the results of the PEC, JSC, SSC and HSC public examinations show outstanding pass rates with a significant number of examinees obtaining GPA-5,’ he remarked.

The national curriculums published in 2012 for students of classes 1 to 12, he said, provided a detailed guideline about the number of textbooks the students would read in each class, the intended contexts, the number of hours of contact between the teachers and the students, the routines for the schools and the approach that the teachers should take for acquiring the objectives.

‘In contrast to what the national curriculums stipulated, the existing [teaching] system is forcing the schools, the parents and the children –all – to aim at securing good marks in the examinations instead of continuous skill development among the students,’ Manzoor said.

‘The introduction of the so-called “creative questions system” in the flawed education system appears as an absolute mess,’ he said.

The deviation from the spirit of the curriculums, he said, begins when the NCTB starts developing the textbooks.

‘Hardly any good writer is employed to translate the spirit of the curriculums into textbooks in view of the requirement of the students and the teachers,’ he said.

‘They [writers] try to include maximum possible content in the books without proper elaboration. Even the language used in the books sometimes is not suitable for the students,’ he pointed out.

When developing a textbook, a committee is formed by the education ministry comprising at least three writers, a reviewer, a subject specialist, an education expert, a child psychologist. The committee is coordinated by an NCTB official.

NCTB member (textbook) professor M Farhadul Islam admitted that scarcity of quality writer for textbooks was a big problem.

A total of 140 textbooks are needed for the students between class 1 and 12, according to NCTB officials.

‘Another major problem is that the teachers do not apply in the classrooms the knowledge they acquire from the training programmes the government offer to them for free,’ he said.

Farhadul also said that the application of the guidelines set in the curriculums was mandatory for the directorate of primary education and the directorate of secondary and higher secondary education.

‘They are the monitoring agencies with the authorities to take actions against the schools if necessary,’ he said.

Though the curriculum specifically states that the children will acquire knowledge in English and Bangla in the classrooms by listening, speaking, reading and writing instead of just memorising you can never show in reality such a classroom in any government or non-government school [where this is the practice], he said further.

In random interviews with New Age several class 5 and class 8 students of Viqarunnisa Noon School and College, Ideal School and College, South Point School and College and Motijheel Government Boys High School said that their teachers at the classes give them lots of home work every day and scold them if they cannot present the completed tasks in the next classes.

‘Teachers start bullying if I say that I don’t understand the textbook lessons,’ said a class 8 student of Ideal school.

Intisar Nisar, who sat for this year’s HSC examination, said that he could answer all the questions on theories of computer programming languages such as algorithm and coding in the ICT examination only by memorising those from the textbooks and guidebooks but they were not given the necessary lessons on using applications of MS Word, MS Excel and Internet browsing.

‘I’m learning those personally after my exam,’ he said.

Dhaka University’s Institute of Education and Research professor SM Hafizur Rahman, who is directly involved in curriculum and textbooks development of the NCTB, said that time constraint and bureaucracy appear as problems for textbook writers.

‘Formation of the committees for writing textbooks is okay, but they cannot work properly for shortage of time and absence of professionals for writing textbooks as found in other countries,’ he said.

Campaign for Popular Education’s deputy director KM Enamul Hoque said that the intended an hour’s contact for each class set in the curriculums is not applied in most of the schools.

‘Most schools operate two shifts compromising the contact hours and the size of classes that are formed to accommodate maximum number of students. As a result, quality education for the students cannot be ensured,’ he said his experiences from conducting several researches on the education system showed.

Ideal School and College principal Dr. Shahan Ara Begum has said that they cannot ensure the prescribed contact hours as they have to run two shifts.

‘Teaching moral values and ethics at the classrooms vary by teachers and so does their teaching methodology,’ she said.

Directorate of primary education’s additional director general of M Abdul Mannan said that the government was introducing continuous assessment programmes for primary level schools.

‘Monitoring of schools is a problem as the directorate officials have to carry out other administrative duties,’ he said.

‘We are also trying to bring the kindergarten schools under our monitoring,’ he said.

Directorate of secondary and higher education director general Professor Syed M Golam Faruque said that the directorate was recruiting more officials for strengthening the monitoring system.

‘We are also planning to modify the evaluation system to nurture creativity of the pupils,’ he said.

Deputy minister for education Mahibul Hassan Chowdhoury said that the government was upgrading the country’s education system in order to produce skilled human resources required to meet the challenges of the present world.