1. Scrap the SRO on English medium schools right away
The government on Sunday issued a statutory regulatory order for private English-medium schools in a
bid to reduce the exorbitant tuition fees charged by the owners and to harmonise its curricula with
Bangladeshi culture and heritage. However, a close scrutiny of the set of rules detailed in the order may
very well lead one to the conclusion that the government is more concerned about the owners’ interest
and does not mind further commercialisation of private-sector education. The order, besides delimiting
student-teacher ratio and prohibiting donation taking among other things, makes it mandatory for
every school to have an 11-member managing committee to regulate its activities and monitor such
issues as fixing salaries and tuition fees. The owners will have the upper hand in the committee, as they
will be able to choose eight out of its 11 members. This is arbitrary and undemocratic. The managing
committee of any educational institutions, English or Bengali medium, should comprise a group of
educated and education-minded people of various backgrounds. It should have students and guardians’
representatives, journalists, doctors, representative from the government and experts on different
subjects. And the process of choosing the members should be absolutely democratic, not favouring the
owners’ group to boost their money-making endeavour.
We are not at all opposed to private and English-medium education. These private schools have been
playing an important role in the urban sections of our society and we do acknowledge the
contributions some of these schools have made to broadening and modernising education in our
country. However, at the same time, we cannot overlook the fact that, in recent years, a number of
English medium schools have simply degenerated into business enterprises. When these educational
institutions are considered as business enterprises run by society’s elite, in other words, the ruling class,
it poses an extremely dangerous sign for the nation. Nowhere in the world is education considered a
commercial tool to further one’s business interests. Education is not a commercial product and these
institutions shape up a nation’s future by educating and guiding the young generation. By allowing the
mushroom growth of these English medium schools and kindergartens, the number of which hovers
around 17,000, successive governments have shown a kind of complicity in commercialising education.
Much of what we have so far had in terms of English medium education is a system which has only
catered to the rich as its goal. The exorbitant fees, in such forms as yearly charges, transport costs,
monthly fees, etc, which are realised by these schools, is proof enough of the profit motive of these
institutions. That, in recent times, some guardians of a few schools joined together to challenge the
arbitrary manner in which the schools were fleecing people was surely a welcome development.
Indeed, it is such awareness that will go a long way towards stemming the greed which goes on in the
name of education at many of the English medium schools.
We strongly demand that the government should scrap the statutory regulatory order in its present
form and urge people to raise their voice against such commercialisation of our education system,
which, if not arrested now, will ruin our young generation and, in the process, the future of the nation.