EDUCATION SECTOR Making sense, nonsense of ‘decline hypothesis’

by Mahmudul H Sumon

THE post-1/11 Awami League government undertook several educational reforms during its valid and invalid tenures. In its earlier phases, at the primary and secondary levels, it declared that the days of ‘rote’ learning were over, and that it would be replaced by an era of what they called ‘acquisition, learning and retrieval.’ It boasted of its achievements in the education sector by highlighting increased pass rates, new curricula and the introduction of the ‘creative questions method.’ Despite a wave of reforms, the widespread public sentiment remained uncertain. Frequent policy changes were derided by experts as ‘experiments on students.’ Teachers often lacked proper training and recruitment itself was plagued by the then government’s corruption. The changes, it seemed, while promising many things, were not backed by good preparation and planning.

Regional colleges performed poorly. Random conversations with college-going students would often give you a dismal picture. A snapshot of such a conversation would be something like below:

How is your college?— There is hardly a class.Why?— Don’t know. No one goes to college; there is no environment.What do you mean by environment?— There are drugs. Teachers don’t show up.

And this is a routine conversation I would have every time I am out of Dhaka. Listening to this, I would often think how privileged I am in terms of my school and college experience.

Things were simply not functional. The question of ‘quality’ does not even arise at this stage! At the tertiary level too, educators often complained that the quality of students entering universities was at its all-time low. When it comes to education in general, a ‘decline hypothesis’ loomed large and needed our attention.

To make sense of this all, I think we must also remember the milieu within which this decline thesis is articulated. This was a time of the Higher Education Quality Enhancement Project, a World Bank initiative that specifically focused on ‘quality’ and ‘relevance.’ Under this project, in 2009 the World Bank approved a $81 million interest-free IDA credit to Bangladesh, designed to improve the ‘quality and relevance of teaching and research in the country’s higher education institutions’ (my emphasis). The project, in short called HEQEP, was deemed to ‘support both innovation and accountability within universities and enhance the technical and institutional capacity of the higher education sector.’

The World Bank, curiously, announced Bangladesh’s commendable achievements in the primary and secondary sectors. It highlighted that the gross primary school enrolment rate is around 90 per cent, the doubling of secondary enrolment since independence, gender parity, etc. Avid readers will note the uncanny resemblance of the World Bank’s knowledge claims with those of the government of the day, but it did not concede ‘similar progress’ for the country’s tertiary level. On the contrary, it characterised Bangladesh’s tertiary enrolment rate as poor (one of the lowest in the world at 6 per cent) and as facing ‘significant challenges when it comes to funding, quality, governance and management’ (my emphasis). The basis of this knowledge is, of course, not known to me.

Citing the World Bank Director Xian Zhu, the WB communiqué said, ‘Higher education is vitally important to energize Bangladesh’s economy and to boost its investment climate,’ and that the HEQEP ‘will fund activities which can bring rapid and visible benefits to the academic community, and help more Bangladeshi youth enrol in universities.’ The project’s main component was to improve the quality and relevance of the teaching and research environment in higher education institutions through encouraging both innovation and accountability in universities, and by enhancing the technical and institutional capacity of the higher education sector.

I will argue that the World Bank project called HEQEP, with its current avatar called Higher Education Acceleration and Transformation (HEAT, in brief, does have a good funding from the government of Bangladesh), represents a shift in discourse when it comes to tertiary education in Bangladesh. The World Bank initiatives are tantamount to what I would call, in a Foucauldian spirit, the governmentality of quality and relevant education. What is also curious is how the World Bank discourse soon began to seep in through different education-related policy discussions and how ‘experts’ submitted to it and argued for skill-based education, sometimes on the pretext of Bangladesh’s demographic dividend.

Although a new government is in power, the governing tropes remain the same. There is ever more emphasis on ‘skill’ and ‘vocational’ learning from the high-ups as well as from the various institutional setups developed in the wake of the quality and relevance discourse in tertiary education. Examples include bodies like Institutional Quality Assurance Cells (IQAC), now a key component of almost all public and private universities in Bangladesh, and frankly no one knows where they sit in the governance structure of our universities.

To ask the question in more concrete terms: Are these institutions/offices (in Jahangirnagar University’s case, housed in the old administrative building) guiding the university’s educational programme? What is then the role and scope of the Academic Council and the Board of Advanced Studies, for example, stipulated in most public university ordinances? Where do these sit in the larger scheme of things?

Elsewhere I have argued that public university administrators in Bangladesh, in general, have been unaware of the politics of this transformation, the long-term effects of the World Bank’s policy prescriptions, and have unwittingly jumped onto the bandwagon of ‘improvement’ and ‘relevance.’ In other words, the administrators were quick to adopt what may be called the governmentality of relevant education, where the skillification and job-readiness of education are all that matter.

The quality discourse came with some benchmarking requirements. How have Bangladeshi universities fared in the world ranking system? Netizens were quick to comment on how many Bangladeshi universities failed to appear on these lists. Private universities, somewhat ahead in this business, quickly jumped onto the bandwagon of the ranking debate, claiming their advanced position. Public university administrators, after realising an imminent setback, asked their ‘lazy professors’ to showcase their achievements on their long-unused university profile pages and help the university move up the ranking ladder. As far as the ranking is concerned, the situation has improved but how that really helps our students? So where do we go from here, or what am I suggesting?

I am concerned here to show how our current debates on education are situated and shaped by global governance (an analytical tool poorly understood, in my opinion). Under the influence of donor-driven projects like HEQEP or HEAT, our universities have been drawn into a neoliberal logic of ‘benchmarking’ and ‘quality assurance.’ These frameworks often measure what is easy to quantify — infrastructure, enrolment and bureaucratic performance indicators — while ignoring what mattered in the past: learning, teaching and intellectual curiosity.

And to add a local story into the mix: the erstwhile Awami League’s politics of establishing a university in every district has created its own crisis. Sociologist Martin Trow once observed that massification transforms universities from elite institutions into mass systems without necessarily ensuring quality or inclusivity.

Most importantly, we must rethink what ‘quality’ means in our context. It cannot be reduced to exam pass rates or international ranking projects. Quality must be about inclusion, care and the cultivation of curiosity. Are these, lately, discussed or considered in the arsenal of techniques introduced in the universities in the name of outcome-based learning and curriculum development? I think not.

Professor Mahmudul H Sumon is the chair of the department of anthropology in Jahangirnagar University.