Imagine the scene, it’s a group of primary school students who are in the audience of our nation’s most hyped education minister. The minister A. N. M. Ehsanul Hoque Milan asks them the following question: “Do you know who the granddaughter of former Prime Minister Khaleda Zia is?”
The students, most of them who knows the answer enthusiastically answer “Zaima Rahman” to which the minister goes “Hopefully in the future you will all do politics with Zaima Rahman”
Seeing this scene, one must sigh in disbelief that after all these whiles, the politicization of education still continues in Bangladesh- especially from a man who was seen as a way to reform the education system but as days go on this promise seems more and more unlikely.
Who is A. N. M. Ehsanul Hoque Milan? Milan used to be the former state minister of education during the previous Khaleda Zia regime, during his tenure he became well known throughout the country for observing exam centres by visiting one exam centre to another using a helicopter. This helped him to build an image of being an anti-corrupt, anti-cheating vigilant education minister in the public eye. Newspapers at the time used to favorably report on his antics back then, giving him even more of a positive reputation.
The BNP government would eventually lose power and within a few years the Hasina regime would start. In the period between 2009-2024 while certain ideas were thrown around with a need to reform education, oftentimes these measures were poorly implemented and often not well thought out. This resulted in the degradation of Bangladeshi education. Furthermore, due to the COVID 19 Pandemic, board examinations had to be taken in weird circumstances often shortening the syllabus or changing question patterns entirely resulting in an inflation of high-grade achievers which further brought criticism upon the government. The government used to frame this in a positive way as the country is getting more educated, but what was felt was that children were not being evaluated properly, they weren’t given the proper education that they needed to be skilled. The situation of education at the university level was even more chaotic as public universities faced brutal student politics related issues, session issues, and political hires in faculty positions. Overall, the state of education during the Hasina regime was a sad mess.
Milan got elected this year in his constituency by a huge margin and due to his previous positive reputation as someone who is serious about fixing the education sector in this country, he was hyped by both BNP activists and general people on social media to become the next education minister. Eventually, whether or not it was because of the hype or his previous experience as the state education minister, he was made the education minister in the current Tarique Rahman cabinet.
So, what does Milan do with his newfound power? The first thing he decides to do is make a populist decision to satisfy older generations of this country to instruct law enforcement officers to not let any adolescent roam around during nighttime.
This law had disastrous consequences as the police in the Shahbagh-Ramna Area led by DB Masud eventually assaulted an innocent Anthropology student at Dhaka University called Nayem Uddin. This led to protests the following day where students surrounded the Shahbagh Police Headquarters. Milan to do damage control retorted his previous statement and said the instructions given to law enforcement officers were for his constituency only. This is a troubling pattern with Milan; he always sways and makes his decision based on the approval of people.
His quintessential populist decisions come in regard to how he wants to fix education in Bangladesh. He wants strict invigilation in exams which whilst praiseworthy is not the only factor in why the education of the country is at such a poor state. Oftentimes Milan was seen with a camera crew going around observing exam centers including a teacher selection exam recently. All of this makes someone wonder how sincere he is in his attempts to reform the education sector. His idea of silent expulsion is something that is a dangerous policy as invigilators could expel somebody, they do not like no matter how severe the crime done in the exam hall was.
Another one of Milan’s populist decisions supported by his state minister education Bobby Hajjaj is that they want to ban coaching centres in Bangladesh. The alternative they propose is in school coaching- one fails to account how out of touch this is on many levels. The reasons this fails include: –
- Private schools in Bangladesh already have in school coachings and they are seen as more of a cash grab for institutions than an actual effective way to teach these children
- Coaching is cheaper than hiring a good private tutor for many and suddenly turning off coachings adds an extra layer of financial burden on students.
- Income for teachers in this country is not that high and thus they have to resort to becoming coaching teachers or opening their own ventures to sustain themselves
- In a lot of schools around the country, some teachers aren’t adequate enough to teach the subject they teach and thus the only way for these students to be properly taught is through a coaching centre offline or online.
The populism doesn’t end here with Milan even suggesting introducing third language studies in all public schools in Bangladesh despite the failure to ensure proper English teachers already in several institutions. The problem that mainly lies with Milan, Hajjaj and people involved in the current government who want to fix the education sector is that they have no long-term vision on how to achieve these goals, no long-term plan to develop the grassroots of the education sector so that ambitious reform projects can be implemented. They want to say what a lot of parents want to hear in this country and make them satisfied on the surface level. In a way, they have repeated a lot of flaws AL had done during their tenure with the education sector.
Finally, the one thing that will haunt Milan’s legacy is the fact that politicization of the education sector in this country continued under him. All of the VC appointees of the interim regime were either replaced or resigned and the new VC appointees all of them belonged to the greater periphery of BNP aligned educators. The most egregious example of this is the reappointment of the BNP leaning VC of KUET who resigned last year due to student protests being reinstated.
The politicisation of campuses around the country hasn’t stopped, meaningful reforms aren’t in sight, and no word has been said about how to improve the higher education sector- the government treats education as a PR project to impress parents rather than taking meaningful action to reform it to strengthen the nation’s youth. It’s a sad state that even after an uprising, things somehow remain the same in this land. Milan is not the first minister to act like a populist with no actual goals and will not be the last one unfortunately.
Azwad Abdullah Ayan is an undergraduate student at BRAC University. He loves reading books about history and non fiction books in his free time.
