Farah Zahir
Managing Editor, Oniket Research Group
A critical read of the Education section’s last sixteen weeks yields an uneven verdict. The editorial board has pulled together a genuinely broad thematic range across the 23 published pieces, and a number of individual contributions demonstrate real intellectual gravity. Yet the commissioning pattern also exposes silences that a steadier editorial hand ought to close.
The 23 articles map across several clusters: examination reform and ministerial accountability (the largest, six pieces), higher education and graduate employability (five pieces), equity and inclusion (six pieces), generative AI and curriculum modernisation (two pieces), literacy and foundational learning (two pieces), and regulation or aspirational pieces at the margins (two pieces).
The purpose of the current report is to evaluate, rather than simply summarise, the TOB Education section’s sixteen week output. What matters is whether the section’s commissioning genuinely balances immediate policy urgency with longer term, systemic thinking, and how often the published pieces rise from description to real theoretical analysis rather than settling for reportage.
Where the Coverage Sits
Six articles congregate around examination reform and ministerial accountability: the university admission examination debate, the One Nation One Question Paper policy, the proposal to shorten public exams, the plan to move SSC and HSC to year end, and two comparative pieces weighing the Indian education minister’s resignation against the Bangladeshi minister’s refusal to step down after the HSC crisis. This is the section’s densest cluster, and understandably so, since examinations remain the single most consequential and most disputed mechanism in Bangladeshi education.
Five pieces take up higher education and graduate employability, including the University Grants Commission’s research budget, two separately commissioned essays on the gap between degrees and jobs, an interview on curriculum reform, and an assessment of the government’s freelancing training scheme. Six more fall under equity, access and inclusion, covering English medium schooling, madrasa reform, regional literacy disparities, school catchment planning, reasonable adjustment for children with special needs, and the constitutional paradox of selective admission tests inside a universal primary system.
A smaller but pointed pair addresses generative AI and curriculum modernisation, comparing Indian and Bangladeshi policy readiness. Two pieces examine literacy and foundational learning quality directly, and two more, on private school certification and on why Bangladesh could become an education destination, sit at the edges of regulation and blue sky ambition respectively.
An Honest Assessment
The balance between immediate urgency and long horizon ambition that the editor claims to pursue is only partially realised. Examination policy, ministerial accountability and the graduate skill gap, all pressing and newsworthy, account for roughly half the section’s output. That proportion is defensible given how much genuine public anxiety surrounds HSC results and youth unemployment. But the systemically ambitious writing is thin by comparison.
Only one piece, on positioning Bangladesh as a regional education destination, truly reaches beyond the next budget cycle or the next exam season, and the primary education foundational learning crisis, arguably the most consequential finding in the entire set given that ninety one percent of Grade 5 students remain at novice level in mathematics, received a single article rather than the sustained scrutiny its scale demands.
Where Theory Did Real Work
Several contributions distinguish themselves precisely because they refused to settle for description. The paradox of selective admission piece anchors its argument in constitutional and rights based philosophy, holding the Compulsory Primary Education Act against the actual gatekeeping practice of elite schools, a move that compels readers to confront a genuine normative contradiction rather than merely noting an inconsistency.
The reasonable adjustment piece imports the social model of disability and the United Kingdom’s statutory framework for special educational needs as a deliberate comparative lens, asking what principles, not merely what programmes, Bangladesh would need to adopt.
The adult literacy piece draws a sharp and valuable distinction between statistical literacy as commonly measured and functional literacy as economically meaningful, a distinction rooted in decades of literature on human capital measurement that seldom finds its way into general policy commentary. The graduate skill gap pieces, taken together, invoke signalling theory implicitly, questioning whether a degree functions as a credential of genuine capability or merely a costly filter, though neither article names the theory outright, a missed opportunity for precision.
This willingness to import theory and principle, rather than simply report facts and quote officials, is genuinely unusual in Bangladeshi policy writing, where short form commentary typically remains at the level of description and complaint. When it works, as in the selective admission and reasonable adjustment pieces, it lifts the section from journalism into genuine policy analysis. When it does not, the section reverts to the familiar cadence of citing a ministry announcement and registering concern.
What Should Come Next
Three gaps merit urgent commissioning. First, teacher quality and teacher training received no dedicated treatment across sixteen weeks despite being the most consistently cited cause of the foundational learning crisis in the underlying research the section itself cited. Second, financing and equity of expenditure, how much the state actually spends per student across rural and urban, public and private tracks, was never addressed directly despite surfacing as subtext in at least four articles. Third, early childhood education, pre-primary provision and school readiness were entirely absent, a significant omission given the section’s own emphasis on foundational learning.
I would also urge at least one piece each on vocational and technical education as a genuine alternative track rather than a residual one, on the language of instruction debate beyond English medium schooling specifically, and on how climate displacement is beginning to disrupt school attendance in coastal and char areas. A section this capable of theoretical seriousness should not leave these threads to chance.
