We should avoid staging the theatre of education The covid situation and the theatre of introducing so-called ‘competency-based’ curriculum pushed the teaching and learning situation in the lowest rung. The teaching learning scenario, receiving and giving education, in the true sense of the term, evaporated many years back from our classes, educational institutions, society with some exceptions occurring in some institutions like missionary and privately run schools and colleges along with cadet colleges of the country. The tradition of going to the class, conducting exams and publishing results happen without any tangible effects as nothing of these goes professionally and fruitfully. There lies no account of what is really going on in the classes, students are learning or they are really participating in the teaching learning situation. Classes go on but what happens here there lies no real account of it. Result is the gap between real learning and these traditional activities is widening day by day. The country now sees holding the largest public examination known as SSC. Every day, a huge number of examines remain absent, get expelled and copy on mass without facing any hurdles. The dailies of Bangladesh bring us to the second day of SSC exam when we see 28 thousand 943 students remained absent, 83 expelled and 18 teachers were also expelled. This number is increasing while exams go forward. Till that day, the percentage of remaining absent in this public examination stands at 1.65. On 15 April English first paper exam was held under nine general education boards where 13 lac 57 thousand 593 examines were registered but that day 15 thousand 628 students were absent. In Dakhil exam 1thousand 490 and in technical education board 2 thousand 825 students remained absent while 36 students were expelled the same day because of adopting unfair means. The very first day of beginning SSC exam, Bengali first paper was the subject when students were seen writing answers opening books. Interestingly, teachers were not seen to take any action. The same thing happened in English exam also that got spread by virtue of social media. Why does it happen? Many practical reasons can be held responsible for that. In the micro level, students don’t come to the class regularly, even though some of them are in the class- they remain there just physically not mentally and attentively. There actually lies no incentive, no encouragement and no positive threat from any side that will convince the students to be attentive in the class, try to learn the subjects through repeated practice, asking questions to teachers and doing several exercises on the topic. All this left from the education scene with the advent of Covid and finally during the trumpeting of so-called ‘new curriculum’ which pushed students into a culture of not reading, not learning, not sitting for assessment. Students are now busy with demonstration against teachers, head teachers, chanting slogans against exams and for short syllabus and without facing any exam instead. They were not seen with any demonstrating in the previous years when the nation killing ‘curriculum was introduced. They take to the streets time and again sometimes for very negligible or some flimsy grounds and sometimes for nothing. They cause untold sufferings to the passers-by and people of all walks of life for any issue which is not related to them at all. The country witnessed the unrealistic and unreasonable demonstration of the students belonging to National University. They demanded to upgrade several colleges into universities. Why? We want to say just to fatten the procession of educated unemployed. Currently, the entire national watches the unruly demonstration of the polytechnic institutions for realizing six demands. We practically see that the students coming out of these institutions don’t acquire any skills of the 21st century which are absolutely necessary for getting jobs. They don’t gain any skill either in their respective disciplines. Now they are found in the streets announcing one program after another remaining away from the class, laboraroty, library or in any workshop or industry where they should go learn skills practically. The education sector definitely harbours many loopholes. To address those, ways must be quite different. To conduct the public examinations a series of directions as usual go to the field to be followed but who bothers? Despite this rotten situation, when examination scripts are distributed among the teachers for evaluation, the board authorities further direct the examiners to go through the scripts very sympathetically without being harsh or tight to check them. This was my experience when I used to be the examiner of boards or question setter. The situation now in this area is far worse. Now examiners are threatened so that no student should fail in any subject and this threat is producing hybrid results every year causing irreparable loss to the students and entire education system. Still things continue happening. We need to decide whether we should allow it to happen further. This educational mismatch produces our officials, teachers and administrators. Necessarily things cannot appear quite refined from it rather with a tinge of it. We know copying goes on in the BCS exam even. Not only that, question leakage in the previous BCS exams was a common affair and some of the perpetrators have been arrested but that rotten culture could not remove the officials it gave birth to. And so, the society must see the consequences. We all want good teachers to teach our children so that they can be engineers, doctors, police officer or administrators. Nobody wants their children to become teachers. So, how can we expect good teachers in the society? You see, for receiving real treatment we go abroad as we don’t have any trust on our doctors and there lies not reason to trust them actually. When we need to do any complex work or sophisticated construction, we need to invite engineers from outside the country. Our students do have merit, they do have creativity but our entire system of teaching learning, nurturing and developing them and assessing their performance prove faulty. That’s why we produce doctors without real medical knowledge and almost the similar situation goes with other areas. In the public examination, questions are very traditional. Students and teachers know which questions will come from which chapters. What kind of questions will be there. The style of questions is also known to them. Despite these facts, students copy in the examination. Its adverse effect will appear in every aspect of their life lives when they occupy any position in the society. Even, the madrasa students who are supposed to be guided by moral and religious education. When they are also copying and their teachers are helping them, words fail to explain the moral degradation of the society! So, we should come forward to avoid staging the drama of education and embrace how real education can be instilled in the minds of our pupils. Masum Billah Lead Education and Research: Dainikshiksha and Amder Barta.President- ETAB ( English Teachers’ Association of Bangladesh) Cell:01714-091431 Email: masumbillah65@gmail.com