More than half of Bangladeshi ten-year-olds in school are not proficient in reading. Pandemic-related school closures made matters worse
Improving the quality of education has proved trickier. More than half of Bangladeshi ten-year-olds in school are not proficient in reading, according to the World Bank, and more than a quarter of those aged between 15 to 24 are not in education, employment or training. A year and a half of pandemic-related school closures have made matters worse.
Sustaining growth will rely on moving from cheap to skilled labour, says Hossain Zillur Rahman of the Power and Participation Research Centre, a think-tank in Dhaka. “Those skills need to be created now,” he says. The government is shaking up the curriculum as a way to achieve that. The plans, which are due to be implemented by 2025, focus on shifting away from mindlessly memorising textbooks and regurgitating them during exams and towards building useful skills.
Though many education experts are in favour of the change, some worry parts of it amount to trying to run before learning to walk. How can coding be taught well when “we cannot ensure numeracy and literacy”, asks Niaz Asadullah, an economist who focuses on education inequality at the University of Malaya in Kuala Lumpur. Moreover, he says, tens of thousands of, which are unaffected by the changes, have no government oversight and teach little beyond the Koran.
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