Demand for Universal Primary Education in Bangladesh: A case study of Jhenaidah District

Abstract

The aims of this study is to search for ways and means for a school system at the primary level of education based on a curriculum and terminal competencies with an unanimous and conscience acceptability of the people in general without much disturbance to the present set up. Such a system may be termed as Universal Primary Education system. The right of education is recognized as a human right and is understood to establish an entitlement to education. It is one of the five basic rights. Education is classified into three broad classes: informal, non-formal and formal. This study belongs to the problem of prevailing multi-channel formal education at primary level in Bangladesh. The learners mainly educated by three different streams-General stream, Ebtedayee Madrassa stream and Kindergarten stream possess three kinds of knowledge. So their thoughts and ideas, plans and programs are not co-linear and they are not guided and led to the same line. Universal primary education, as is emphasized by different world bodies and organization is indicative of uniform or uni-channel one. Almost all the education commissions set by the Bangladesh Govt. the NGO’s and many individual researchers highlighted this problem and considered it as a barrier towards the implementation of universal primary education. But neither the Government nor any NGO’s taken any initiative or highlighted any way to solve this problem. General objective of the study is to see the socio-economic and educational attainment impacts of Demand for Universal Primary Education in Bangladesh. Though Bangladesh is a country of unique language-Bengali, here prevails a multi-channel education right from primary level which is against and hinders the spirit of universal primary education. This region including Bangladesh was ruled by many rulers with different religious faith. Brief history of the educational reforms in Bangladesh, as well as in the Indian sub-continent is discussed. This justifies the existence of a multi-channel education in a country of univocal language. Having the history scrutinized, we can say that primary education that we find today is not shaped in a day or two. This dissertation is an exploratory one and based on mainly primary data. The data was collected from the study area in two different phases to serve different objectives. At the first phase, data was collected two times from 523 respondents. In the second phase, two examinations were conducted on the students of class V. Two stage stratified PPS cluster sampling design for collecting data followed by analysis of data and the underlying tools and methodology used in inference procedure are discussed in brief. Twenty variables/covariates associated with the respondents including the demand for universal primary education have been studied of which nine has no association and nine has significant at p≤0.01 and one has p≤0.05 level of significance indicated by the calculated chi-square value with the demand for universal primary education. The cross relationship between social identity and year of schooling, basic education at primary level, land holding size, monthly family income, expenditure are highly associated. A stepwise logistic regression shows that associated variables to affect the demand for universal primary education. Younger people in comparison to aged, smaller land holding size in comparison to larger land holding size and alternative demand to General and Madrassa education in comparison to Kindergarten highly demand the Universal Primary Education. The logistic regression model is observed to be well fit as is indicated by LR statistic = 222.588. Cox and Snell R^2=0.593, Negelkerke R ̅^2= 0.808 and Model χ^2=470.294. It is observed that when the value of R ̅^2 exceeds 0.5 that data fit binary logistic regression model fit. So the model can be used for the significant prediction about the demand for a universal primary education in Bangladesh. The ratio regression model produced a good result with R^2=0.9818 and adjusted R ̅^2=0.9492. Results of logit regression analysis are left out because, logit transformation of demand proportions yield a large number of indeterminate out puts making the analysis useless. Two surveys were conducted with changed order of terminal competencies at each survey among the dissimilar (76-28) =48 of the three different streams. The Pearson frequency correlation =0.533 and rank correlation =0.511 that the correlation is significant at the 0.01 level. So, survey result is reliable. There is no hard and first rule for selecting the 30 terminal competencies out of 48. We have proposed five arbitrary rules (Test-Re-Test method) in order to eliminate the 30 (maximum) out of 48 dissimilar terminal competencies among the streams. Spearman rank correlation 0.911 and Pearson correlation coefficient 0.909 are in close agreement indicating the high reliability of survey results selected under rule-IV. To test the validity of rule IV, two set of questions are prepared. One set comprised of original terminal competencies of each stream. Another set with the newly selected 30, in addition to common 28 for all the streams. Correlation (Pearson) coefficient of marks in the two separate examinations considered as measure of validity of the terminal competencies obtained by rule IV for streams separately and for the total system. Correlation between the scores of two examinations is observed to be highly consistent and nearly constant, justifying the validity of the proposed model. Hence, the set of terminal competencies selected under rule-IV along with existing common 28 in total (28+30) = 58 terminal competencies may be recommended as reliable and valid terminal competencies for the uniform and universal primary education in Bangladesh. To develop a measure of efficiency for education system based on academic performance of students. Advantage of the proposed measure is that it can be used at each and every situation, for individual school to national level, for sub system to aggregate system and for uniform and multi-channel education systems. Efficiency of the existing multi-channel primary education is compared with a proposed uniform and universal primary education in Bangladesh by using the proposed measure. Results obtained are observed to be useful and encouraging. Proposed universal system may be run experimentally in some of the schools and results of those schools may be compared with existing multi-channel schools for relative efficiency of the universal primary education.