Editorial
Long holidays, empty classrooms
Number of schooldays and hours must go up
The thought that children in Bangladesh spend less time in school than children in other SAARC nations is dispiriting. With the state of overall education being a live public issue for the past many years, this latest bit of information only reveals what should have been obvious to all and why action on it should have been taken earlier. We cannot but begin doing that by noting the scarce or non-existent classroom interaction between teachers and pupils at present. And that is precisely where the problems begin. With such a staggering number of holidays, 137 days to be exact (apart from unscheduled ones owing to political agitation, natural calamities and the like), such interaction can only be wishful thinking. Whatever classroom engagement there is at present is abysmally low and does not even come up to regional standards.
Such circumstances ought not to have been there at all. With the government providing schools with subsidies, textbooks and other facilities, it should have been for these institutions to demonstrate an ability to produce a large, regular crop of educated, intelligent young people. But all these facilities simply get lost or go down the drain when pupils get to enjoy such a large number of holidays. Simply stated, the time has now come for academics and education policy makers to devise a strategy aimed at an enhancement of the quality of education in Bangladesh's schools. The first step that needs to be taken here is to drastically reduce the number of holidays for these schools. Eid, summer and winter vacations, totaling 65 days, call for a clear curtailment. It is only natural that with such long holidays, students will develop a propensity to go out of touch with textbooks. The need, therefore, is to increase the number of working days in school and bring them at par with those that schools in the rest of South Asia enjoy. One other point that may be considered is an increase in the number of school hours. In other words, school timings must be so arranged as to allow a focused education curriculum to be maintained.
We hardly need re-emphasise the point that schools are there to develop a nation's human base and so prepare its future leadership. They plant, as it were, the roots which bind a people to their heritage and reinforce their links with posterity. Obviously, such goals get lost in a maze if classrooms remain shut for nearly a third of the year.
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