THE college teachers posted at local government colleges but working now in the cities particularly in metropolis Dhaka under temporary staying out arrangement will have to go back to their original place of posting. A directive recently issued from the Prime Minister’s Office (PMO) and reported by The New Nation will force over 1,500 government college teachers now working in different city colleges and Education Directorates to go back to their original place of posting in the countryside. It is known to all quarters that colleges in the rural areas are tremendously suffering from shortage of teachers’ least to talk about quality teachers as many of them are staying out under an informal adjustment scheme.
The new move is highly appreciable because the return of the teachers to the local colleges again will help improve the teaching quality and remove teachers’ crisis. The shortage of teachers or quality teachers mainly in rural colleges has already made our education system highly uneven and discriminatory. Students in urban colleges do well because there is no shortage of teachers. Since experienced teachers teach them, most students do well as against the lack-lustre position of students from the countryside. The system needs total overhauling to remove the quality gap by creating the necessary condition there to create good students.
The quality teachers’ crisis is only deepening due to most teachers desire to live in cities. Most government college teachers posted in rural areas manage their transfer to district towns and even to the capital by way of intense lobbying. Many of them have powerful relatives like MPs, Ministers and ruling party leaders to secure a temporary place of their choice in city colleges and Education Directorates. But it is seriously harming regular teaching in local colleges. They are even overcrowding at the workplaces leaving their local colleges limping behind.
In this situation, the PMO order is expected to be implemented to achieve the desired goal by sending teachers from the cities to the rural place of posting. It will have immediate impact on the quality of teaching and improvement in the performance of students from closer to the brink. Many believe that the present situation has been created by intervention of politically influential persons in and around the government and if the PMO wants to implement the order, there must be the political will from the same quarters.
We believe that since the order has been issued from the PMO, the Ministry of Education must take vigorous steps to send all those teachers to their original place of posting. Let there be the precaution, it must be implemented even handedly because any discriminatory step may ultimately put the initiative to failure.
