They find it quite puzzling that there was a serious dearth of initiative in holding debates and quiz shows on contemporary environmental issues or the relevance of computer in day to day life, as per a report of a local daily.
In this context, they find the National Education Policy 2010 quite out of place with its avowed stress that schools ought to hold Science Fairs and Olympiads in order to popularize science and mathematics among their students. Absence of these co-curricular pursuits, they said, confined science education to studying textbooks alone with little practical exposure that could widen their horizon.
They said that the teachers and the parents attach no importance to co-curricular science activities due to their total concentration on results in exams held by Education Boards.
Shortage of laboratories and apparatus, they said discourage study of science and, therefore, was reducing the number of learners opting to take science at Secondary Schools.
A BUET Professor said that he finds high sounding declarations for spreading science education in this country as nothing more than ‘lip service’.
Education officials and the school authorities take no interest in science based co-curricular activities, said The Education Policy 2010 Formulation Committee Co-chair. Out of the country’s 1.25 crore secondary school and madrassah students, hardly 8,000 participate in Science Olympiads organized by Bangladesh Academy of Sciences.
It is hardly surprising that the country’s schools don’t hold Science Fairs — most school authorities and guardians hold anything outside of academics to be a waste of time. Thus the holding of Science Fairs is limited to a select few mostly English Medium schools which the vast majority of our country’s students can’t attend due to the exorbitant fees.
It is a tragedy that students coming from lower income backgrounds — who need the most exposure to such experience, are deprived of them due to inadequate infrastructure and the decisions by School Administrators who feel anything non academical is irrelevant. This should not be the case.
While theoretical lesson is important, so is the knowledge of its practical applications. Its not that we don’t have world class talent — Bangladeshi teams are regularly selected for NASA’s competitions which centre around Mars Rovers. We feel there that are thousands more of such talented students around the country who are deprived of such aspirations because they lack the practical base to train themselves. These students must be given a base to practice on their dreams and allowed to bring it to reality.
