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Suddenly, the teacher got annoyed with her student. She first beat the boy with a cane and then asked him to bob up and down 250 times while holding his ears. Aminul followed the teacher's order and bobbed up and down 212 times before falling on the floor unconscious. Instead of getting immediate medical attention, he had to stay at school until classes were finished for the day.
After Aminul arrived home, his parents found his hands and legs were becoming swollen and the boy's eyes were bleeding and he was vomiting frequently. Moreover, since the incident, Aminul has been suffering from a fever and has been screaming from the severe pain and refuses to eat. His parents and doctors are worried as to whether Aminul will survive his injuries.
Instead of taking action against the teacher, the acting headmaster of the school, Yunus Bepari, shouted at Aminul's mother when she went to seek justice for the beating of her son.
Unfortunately, Aminul's painful experience is not the first incident at the school. In February, two other students named Mamun and Shahin in the fifth grade experienced similar brutality and left the school. Both of them have now been admitted to a local madrasa, a traditional Muslim religious school.
The reported condition of Aminul reveals the level of brutality he faced at the hands of his teacher, compelling his doctors and parents to be worried about his life. In addition, the verbally abusive reaction of the acting headmaster of the school to the boy's mother suggests many untold stories embedded in this society. This incident, one of hundreds of similar cases in Bangladesh, raises many questions about the overall methods and quality of the education system in the country.
Like Akter, schoolteachers have inherited a tradition of beating their students, repeating violence in the classroom that they themselves experienced in their own childhoods. They apply the same brutal methods after they become teachers. Between being students and becoming teachers, they have usually earned at least one academic degree, but their education seems to have added zero value to their sense of proportionality and to their moral compass.
The experience of Aminul and innumerable other students in Bangladesh is an indictment of the country's education system. It has been ineffective in instilling human values in its students, from primary school to the university level, as education in Bangladesh has not taught people to avoid brutality and other malpractices that have been a way of life in the country. Sadly, the education system has not improved the quality of the students of today who may be the teachers of tomorrow.
This criticism is not limited to what might be considered substandard schools in the nation. Teachers at the country's so-called best and famous educational institutions, which produce tomorrow's leaders, have not ingrained such values as respect and love either. None of them have taken responsibility to nurture the next generation and develop the nation; teaching is merely a job like any other. Bangladesh's academic institutions only provide diplomas, not a proper education.
If an outsider visits Bangladesh and tries to ascertain who the country’s teachers are, the foreign guest will learn that they are the poorest people. The teachers' poverty includes not only their financial remuneration but also their academic records, knowledge, training, moral and intellectual quality and daily practices. Only those who were inferior students are interested in being teachers in Bangladesh. Why? A teacher’s salary, regardless of the school, never suffices to support him or her, let alone an entire family.
The job of a teacher in public schools is so undesirable that the authorities receive fewer applications than the vacant posts advertised in a country in which at least 17 million somewhat-educated youths are still unemployed. A person who has no hope of getting a job contacts the representatives of local government bodies, and the politicians of his locality, after being bribed, pursue these representatives to get the person a job in a local private school with the hope that the job-seeker will later vote for them – such is the system!
In urban areas, teaching has become merely a business. Teachers, from kindergarten to university, open "coaching centers" to teach students privately for a fee. Consequently, school classrooms have turned into places of gossip, and the homes of the teachers have been transformed into "education stores."
Students who can afford the high expense of these "education stores" are, in essence, able to buy degrees as they can secure higher marks to get the top public and private jobs. Those without money to pay for private tutors get a certificate to wobble around looking for a job. As a result, both the haves and the have-nots may receive diplomas, but without attaining any credible knowledge and values that would be an asset to the country.
The Ministry of Education, Dept. of Education and Dept. of Primary and Mass Education, including the education boards of various jurisdictions, have failed to adopt any standard education policy or infrastructure for the nation in the last four decades. Furthermore, the present military-controlled government has recently decided to entrust the primary education sector to a non-governmental organization to manage and develop!
In the 21st century, people are exploring new planets in the universe, and NGOs are invading the public sector while the government is shirking its responsibility and is unable to provide an education for its people. Those nations that explore new planets do so as a result of their education systems, which build up their nations.
Will Bangladesh take a step backward by allowing brutality and immoral practices in academic institutions and by making education a business for corporate businessmen and NGOs to make money out of the working poor?
The education system in Bangladesh has always been an undeveloped sector, with precarious implications for both horizontal and vertical levels of the social strata. The coterie of political-bureaucratic vested interests has never taken into consideration what happens beneath the surface of the education system, the most catalytic institution among the agents of social change. To avert a serious predicament in the near future, the nation's leaders must see beneath the surface of the education system and undertake drastic changes before Bangladesh becomes even more impoverished and backward.
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(Rater Zonaki is the pseudonym of a human rights defender based in Hong Kong working at the Asian Human Rights Commission. He is a Bangladeshi national with a degree in literature from a university in Dhaka. He began his career as a journalist in 1990 and engaged in human rights activism at the grassroots level in his country for more than a decade. He also worked as an editor for publications on human rights and socio-cultural issues and contributed to other similar publications.)
