The New Nation - Internet Edition

Mamunur Rashid

At least 1,000 coaching centres are being run illegally in the capital, which collectively earns huge amount of money but the Government is yet to take any initiative to stop this burgeoning business.

The coaching centres are of different types, foreign language training, university admission and BCS admission coaching, even centres offering good results to students of schools and colleges in their examinations. More recently centres have sprout up especially catering to the needs of smart young men and women interested to work in highly lucrative call centres.

Teachers from kindergarten to university level open "coaching centres" to teach students privately for a considerable of money as fee. Consequently, school classrooms have turned into gossiping dens.

Some students of the English Medium schools and first or second-year students of public and private universities are also teaching in these coaching centres. As a result the students come out of these institutions practically knowing nothing.

Most of the coaching centres publish colourful advertisement and distribute leaflets in different parts of the city to attract parents of students mainly coming from villages.

Some of the coaching centres specialise on teaching IELTS or TOEFL or GMAT or SAT, GRE, ACCA and CAT students.

Teachers of the so-called best and famous educational institutions, which produce tomorrow's leaders, have ignored such values as respect, love and dedication. None of them have taken the responsibility to nurture the next generation and develop the nation; teaching is merely a job like any other to them.

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 1 crore educated youths are still unemployed. A person who has no hope of getting employed grease the palm of the influential persons to get a teaching job in a private school.

Students who can afford the high expense of these "education stores" are able to buy degrees and those unable to pay for private tutors get a certificate and both wobble around looking for a job.

Education in Bangladesh has always been an undeveloped sector and little had been done to find out what happens beneath the surface of the education system. To avert a serious predicament in the near future, the nation's leaders must undertake drastic changes before Bangladesh becomes even more impoverished and backward.

The Ministry of Education, including the education boards, have failed to adopt any standard education policy or infrastructure for the nation in the last four decades.