Farah Zahir
Managing Editor, The Oniket Bulletin
A recent article in the Oniket Bulletin presents English medium education in Bangladesh as a largely successful stream that simply needs better coordination with national institutions. It cites internationally recognized curricula, strong O Level and A Level results, growing presence in multinational companies, and admission to leading global universities as evidence of achievement, while treating brain drain, weak participation in public service, and cultural distance as manageable side effects.
This framing is comfortable, but it is also shallow. It documents outcomes without asking why the sector exists in its current form, who actually benefits from it, and what it costs the country that is not captured in exam results.
The Question the Article Never Asks
The most glaring omission is the most obvious one. Why has English medium education expanded so aggressively over three decades in the first place? The article treats this expansion as a natural response to globalization and family aspiration, yet it never examines whether this growth is really a symptom of failure inside Bangla medium schools. If Bangla medium institutions delivered a genuinely functional English curriculum and produced graduates competent enough for global academic and professional environments, would so many middle- and upper-income families feel compelled to abandon the national system altogether. The silence on this question is telling. It allows English medium schools to be celebrated as an achievement rather than examined as evidence of a deeper curriculum and language teaching failure within the mainstream Bangla medium system that the government continues to underfund and neglect.
Market Share Growth Without Standard Scrutiny
The article celebrates the spread of English medium schools from a handful of Dhaka institutions to district towns nationwide, but expansion of market share is different from expansion of quality. As demand has grown, so have the number of hastily established institutions charging premium fees while offering underqualified teaching staff, inconsistent adherence to Cambridge or Edexcel standards, and minimal regulatory oversight. Bangladesh has no robust, uniformly enforced accreditation regime capable of distinguishing a genuinely rigorous English medium institution from one trading on the label alone. The article’s uncritical praise of academic excellence ignores this uneven reality entirely.
Teachers Without a Standard Bar
Closely tied to this is the question of teacher quality, which the original piece never addresses. International curricula are only as strong as the people delivering them. Many English medium schools recruit teachers with limited pedagogical training, inconsistent English proficiency of their own, and little grounding in child psychology or modern teaching methods. A curriculum imported from Cambridge does not automatically produce a Cambridge standard classroom. Without a national framework for certifying and monitoring English medium teaching staff, the sector’s claimed academic excellence rests on assumption rather than verified standard.
Globalization as a Cover for Misdirected Growth
The language of globalization and international competitiveness that the article leans on obscures a more uncomfortable truth. Much of this growth is driven by status anxiety rather than genuine educational strategy. Families are not always choosing English medium schools because they have assessed learning outcomes; they are choosing them because English medium enrollment functions as a visible marker of social class. This demonstration effect pushes middle class households, many with modest and stretched incomes, into committing a disproportionate share of family savings toward tuition, foreign examination fees, and eventually overseas application costs, often at the expense of retirement security or other children’s education. The article frames this spending as investment in the global job market. It rarely is framed honestly as what it often becomes, a drain on middle class household finances chasing prestige as much as opportunity.
Isolation From the Mainstream
The article’s own admission that English medium graduates are underrepresented in public administration, the judiciary, and government service deserves far sharper scrutiny than it receives. This is not a minor coordination gap to be solved with incentive schemes. It reflects a generation of graduates who grow up with limited exposure to Bangla literature, national history, the Liberation War, and the civic and political life of their own country. Many are simply unfamiliar with the language, procedures, and institutional culture of Bangladesh’s public service examinations and administrative system. The result is a segment of the most privileged and internationally credentialed citizens who remain largely disconnected from local politics, community institutions, and the everyday civic fabric most Bangladeshis inhabit. Their absence from national policymaking is not incidental. It is the predictable outcome of an education model that trains students to compete internationally while leaving them strangers to their own country.
Conclusion
An honest account of English medium education in Bangladesh cannot stop at exam scores and university admissions. It must confront the curriculum failures in Bangla medium schools that fuel this growth, the absence of enforced teaching and institutional standards, the social status economy draining middle class savings, and the civic isolation of a generation being raised to succeed everywhere except at home. Until these questions are asked directly, coverage of this sector will keep celebrating a surface story while the deeper national reality stays unexamined.
