Unlike every year, 2018 was an exceptionally hectic one for the education sector of Bangladesh and, of course, all incidents were not that sweet for some certain reasons.
Both pleasant and disturbing incidents took place in 2018 like every other year. Government has taken several fantastic steps in the last year to develop the education system, which were immensely appreciated by the eminent academicians.
Especially in the first half of the previous year, education sector of our country saw couple of big achievements. Bangladesh, possibly the only one country in the world, which provides textbooks at the primary level to it's school-going children every year.
Same thing happened at the right time in the last year too. It is an unparallel success for a third world country. This excellent matter happened only for the gigantic effort of the government.
Goodwill and teamwork can make everything possible in the world and this achievement is the biggest example of this saying. All departments of the government worked collectively in this case.
Whereas many nations of the world lavishly pumps billions of dollars for the deadly ammunition, fighter jets and awe-expensive aerial defense system, our government use its money for the development of the education system.
The whole credit goes to Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina, eldest daughter of the father of the nation Bangabandhu Sheikh Mujibur Rahman, whose tremendous conviction make it possible. She did it for the sake of the millions of children's future of this country.
Bangabandhu often said about 'Sonar Bangla', a country where all citizens will live in peace, harmony and healthy condition. There will be financial security for everyone. Nobody will cry for food, shelter and all other basic needs. PM Sheikh Hasina has taken similar path to materialize her father's golden dream.
Vocational education has seen significant improvement last year. Crores of currency has been given to the private and public vocational education centers. Many technical institutions were established in the last couple of years, which continued last year too.
ICT (Information and Communications Technology) education has seen a revolution last year. This matter was a great push in case of vocational education. These kinds of initiatives have relieved the unemployment problem of the country also.
However, our education sector suffers from some critical problems. We have seen some of them in the previous year too. Regular question leak is such an incident, where government should concentrate. It becomes a chronic problem for our education sector at present. Like every year, question papers of several public examinations were leaked regularly by some evil quarters of the administration.
In the regular interval, we have seen this unfortunate incident. Education ministry must take care of this essential matter without any delay, because, if this unhealthy practice continued, our country will suffer severely in the long run.
Children will not care the examination system in future, if such practice continued, because they are getting the question papers of examinations easily before the tests. So, why they will study?
This deep rooted monstrous matter should be checked at any cost. However, controlling this evil phenomenon is really a hard nut to crack, because, it is so widespread that nowadays everyone, even the parents of the examinees, waits for the leaking of question papers before the examinations.
Education ministry can take the help of ICT ministry to check the practice, because, often these kinds of question leaking incidents happen through the social networking websites.
In case of our country, Facebook is playing a pivotal role to spread question papers. It is tough to believe that at the present time question leak is happening in the primary levels too. This is a shocking matter indeed because later in their life, these children will never respect the education system.
They will always think that if you have enough money, you can buy everything. And, every time they will prefer illegal money over study. Another dreadful episode shook the nation last year. A ninth-grade student of a renowned school of the capital committed suicide and her friends and family alleged that it was happened due to the ill treatment of her teachers.
Students of that school alleged that their teachers treated badly with their parents and abuse them time and again. This student protest of unfortunate suicide took place in a massive scale throughout the country later, because, student suicide due to the teacher's negligence is quite common in the remote areas of the country too.
Last year primary school teachers have staged a major protest in the capital for certain demands. There is a tremendous dissatisfaction among them because of the meager amount of salary and other basic privileges.
They have said that there is a huge disparity in case of their salary system. Even though government has taken several steps to meet up their demands, but, still many of them are not so happy with these initiatives. The honorable teachers have said that these are not enough, because, major demands were purposefully neglected by the concerned authority.
Government should take care of these issues in this term, because, primary school teachers are the creator of the future citizens of our country. Therefore, they should live in a happy condition for the sake of our nation.
Last year the primary education of our country has suffered a lot for this massive protest of the respected primary school teachers, because, many of them came to the capital for the protest from the rural areas. As a result, classes of the primary schools of rural areas came to a standstill. Primary school children suffered a lot for this reason.
Last but not the least, there were ups and down in the education sector in 2018. Government has taken several steps to modernize the education system, however, still there are many challenges, which should be tackled in a sophisticated way.
The writer is a freelance contributor