THE secret of a country’s potentials for development is underlying in educating the people and maintaining their sound health to grow them as a sound workforce. Their skills, workability and longevity are critical factors to strengthen human productivity at the end but it needs total reform to our education and health delivery system and higher government allocations to deliver it.
A report in a national daily on Monday said quoting a highly regarded NGO person that the country needs more investment in education and health making a strong case for accelerating the pace of socio-economic growth. He made the comment while talking at a working session of Bangladesh Development Forum (BDF) in the city. He laid special emphasis on teaching of science and mathematics and the need for alluring people to teaching to build a nation in the highly competitive world.
He has rightly pointed to limitation of resources but put greater blame on our poor system of education along with poor standard of governance. We fully agree with him when he said China achieved envious growth making an oversized population productive properly educated and ensuring them sound health. Political stability helped the nation to achieve the goals. Bangladesh can also derive its demographic dividend by increasing investment in education and health sector to transform the people into change makers.
What he said is not new that nobody now wants to become a teacher but his remedial suggestions were quite timely when he said students after graduation may be given stipends to end further studies to become teachers. The government should also merge the primary and secondary education in a Ministry separating higher education under a different Ministry. It should exclusively work for skill development to create manpower targeted to demands in the economy.
Our education is lacking quality education and leakage of question papers of the public examinations has further blocked the road to quality education. At this time of technological breakthrough in every sector, our education can’t remain open ended; we must produce skilled manpower to stand in competition both in domestic and global market.
We fully agree with the assertion that the key to our development lies in properly educating a healthy new generation to learn a skill and become highly productive workforce. We can develop ourselves and the future by reforming our education and improving health services to transform the population into human capital. There must be deep-rooted reforms in our education and outreach of health delivery system to achieve the goal.
