Editorial
Staying with what's good
Education ministry turns a leaf from caretaker book
In what looks like a major move, the dynamic education minister Nurul Islam Nahid is resurrecting a project that the caretaker government had taken up but which got lost in a bureaucratic tangle down the road. The undertaking is aimed at upgrading 306 non-government high schools into model public schools at the upazila level. The upazilas having no public school will have one now at the rate of 100 per fiscal.
The Tk 465.77 crore three-phase programme launched with the objective of bridging the disparity in standards of schooling obtaining between the urban centres and the outlying upazilas will be implemented by 2013.
It is strategic move to bring uniformity in the educational standards taking into account the reality that two-thirds of the high school students inhabit the rural outback who have been traditionally deprived of reasonably good education.
Dearth of qualified teachers, educational aids and equipment, computers, libraries, laboratories and sport facilities has been a persistent drawback in a majority of high schools. The teacher : student ratio is extremely adverse while many schools are dogged by severe space constraints.
One of the very debilitating factors lay in lack of sustainable teacher training arrangements. From this point of view, the Directorate of Secondary and Higher Education (DHSE) has taken a very appropriate decision to set up resource centres in nine regions for imparting teacher training, and hopefully, retraining, by way of updating skill levels. Only that this part of the project will have to be synchronised with the pace of conversion of private schools into public schools in the selected upazilas. Otherwise, the whole exercise will have a fault-line that may cost dear in terms of providing trained hands to the upgraded schools.
In the end, we emphasise the need for efficient school management committees consisting of reputable, honest and professional elements, not just because the project involves a radical transformation of poorly managed private schools into fully government aided public schools but also entailed here is expenditure of a huge amount of public money.
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