Sir Ken Robinson, a British author, speaker, and international education adviser, often spoke about Death Valley in California. For many years, it appeared to be a barren, lifeless landscape. Yet after a period of heavy rain and favourable environmental conditions, the valley suddenly burst into life. Flowers appeared across the desert floor, not because life had been created, but because life had always been there, waiting for the right conditions in which to grow. The lesson for education is profound.
For centuries, education has been viewed as the key foundation of civilisation, personal enlightenment, and national progress. The purpose of education goes beyond memorising facts to award degrees. It is about realising the potential to be a moral citizen with the right competencies, a virtuous leader with great vision, an imaginative mind to ignite fire, and a merciful soul to impact society and others. Nelson Mandela brilliantly stated, “Education is the most effective weapon for changing the world.”
Despite the growing pains of the early years, successive governments in the first two decades of Bangladesh’s independence prioritised improving access to education. Primary education was expanded. Public universities were founded. Gradually, the country became more literate. Education was treated as a service with a development goal for the nation as a whole, rather than as a commodity. The 1990s marked the beginning of far-reaching change for Bangladesh as it adopted economic liberalisation and globalisation. The industrialisation of the country led to growth in the ready-made garments sector and in the private sector, resulting in the recruitment of skilled personnel. A corresponding response was the explosion of the private education sector, including universities, English-medium schools, coaching centres, and schools.
There are positive and negative aspects to the liberalisation of the national economy and the education system. For many students, liberalisation brought previously unavailable opportunities to attend university. Innovations in teaching methods were motivated by competition. Improved connections with other universities motivated many students to become globally competitive. Additionally, Bangladesh received acclaim for its progress toward near-complete enrolment in primary education and increased female participation in education. The tendency to turn education into a market has had both pros and cons for Bangladesh and many other countries. The positive aspect is the competition among students and the rankings of teaching institutions. The negative aspect is how, for many families, education has become an investment to help fulfil their children’s employment needs. Educational success used to mean the realisation of intellectual potential. Now, success has been redefined to mean exam results, GPA, and the opportunity to attend aspirational universities or study abroad.
The pursuit of education, rather than knowledge and wisdom, has been transformed into a race to win certificates. Education systems encounter similar problems worldwide. Measuring educational outcomes, global university rankings, and labour-market competition have led many institutions to prioritise outcomes that are easy to measure. Consequently, degrees are seen as economic investments and students are regarded as clients purchasing a service. Technologies have fundamentally changed the world we live in. Knowledge can be shared instantly and used in many different ways with a single click. Digital teaching and learning tools have changed how students learn and how knowledge is shared and applied.
In this world, to successfully compete, memorising facts is not sufficient. Critical thinking, creativity, flexibility, teamwork, and digital literacy, as well as reasoning and ethical judgment, are skills that learning is expected to develop for the workforce of the future. Employees are expected to assess and address complex workplace problems quickly and to develop innovative solutions while learning. These skills are not developed by exam-focused learning.
The innovation in education and the integration of technology are aimed at preparing citizens for the 4th Industrial Revolution. More change is needed beyond the curriculum. Teachers need additional professional learning, schools need to use better resources, universities need to enhance their research opportunities, and assessment systems need to value depth of understanding rather than superficial recollection. All this should occur alongside efforts to reduce educational inequities based on location (rural vs urban), ownership (public vs private), and personal background. Beyond work-readiness, a quality education should produce ethical individuals who appreciate plurality, support democracy, safeguard the environment, and enrich society through their activities. An economy that grows but is devoid of morality will foster a society that is prosperous yet still corrupt, socially and job-inequitable, and increasingly lacking in trust.
There is little doubt that Bangladesh has made important strides in expanding access to education and increasing literacy. Bangladesh has created a rapidly growing economy that has improved the lives of many of its citizens. The next challenge is to improve the quality of education as education expands rapidly. In the current age, educated people can call on AI to provide answers to complex questions and to create and substantiate complex arguments. Education needs to shift from being just a means to an end in the job market to one that caters for the human-centred qualities of empathy, ethics, leadership, creativity, and wisdom. Citizens of developed and sustainable nations will possess these attributes.
Education is a prerequisite for the development and sustainability of citizenship in Bangladesh, as it fulfils its economic aspirations. We should evaluate the success of our education system beyond exam scores, graduation rates, and employment numbers. It should evaluate success based on the character, competence, and integrity of the people it has educated. Losing the human purpose behind education may result in having many qualified individuals but lacking compassionate leaders, responsible citizens, and innovators. The future of Bangladesh will rest on educating not just more numbers, but on showing people how to think, how to serve, and how to build a better nation.
The image of ‘Death Valley’ illustrates how we might view the future of education in Bangladesh. While Death Valley is largely barren, we cannot be certain the seeds beneath the surface lack life. Likewise, we cannot assume that a lack of development in children indicates the absence of intelligence and imagination. Bangladesh is not suffering from a shortage of talented and motivated young people. What the country lacks are the appropriate conditions that will allow those qualities to flourish. Suppose we can take education beyond the pursuit of good grades and instead focus on nurturing natural curiosity and creativity. Only then will we build a strong character and a strong sense of service to the community; we may witness miraculous changes. In that sense, the more compelling question is not how many institutions of higher learning we build, how many degrees we confer, or how many students we graduate, but what sort of people these institutions will develop.
The future of Bangladesh will be written not by those who know more but by those who can imagine more, ask the important questions, and act with integrity and compassion. In a country like ours, the potential is already alive and well. Our most important work is to create the conditions for it to bloom.
The writer is a UK-based educator, researcher, and author
