THE country’s education sector has slipped into a state of restless paralysis. Students protest at Shahbagh, at Barisal highway crossings, at the gates of Jagannath University, while teachers — from government primary schools to private colleges — mobilise strikes, sit-ins and grand rallies. The noise is deafening, the grievances are real and the classrooms are increasingly empty. Yet, beneath this turbulence, one truth stares us in the face: education itself has gone into hibernation.
Every day brings news of fresh unrest. Students of BUET and other universities blocked Shahbagh over a demand as technical as the right to monopolise the prefix ‘engineer.’ Jagannath University students locked its vice chancellor in the office for eight hours. Barisal University students took over the Dhaka-Kuakata highway, plunging traffic into chaos. Meanwhile, students of Kishoreganj University and Rabindra University pressed for permanent campuses, while Dhaka University, Jahangirnagar University and Rajshahi University are entangled in the revival of student union elections. The mosaic of demands may appear scattered, but the underlying current is the same: discontent has become the lingua franca of campus life.
On the other end of the spectrum, teachers — who are supposed to keep the education wheel turning — are themselves locked in agitation. From the Sahakari Shiksha Sangathan Oikya Parishad rallying primary teachers at the Shaheed Minar, to the MPO-affiliated alliance issuing strike ultimatums, the chorus is the same: pay us more, upgrade our grades, nationalise our institutions. Even government primary school teachers, who once took pride in the stability of their jobs, are now preparing for mass mobilisation, demanding salary upgrades that place them higher on the bureaucratic ladder. Education officers at upazila and thana levels lament being left behind for 31 years without promotion. The resentment seeps downwards: classrooms go untended, students drift further into private coaching centres, and the skeletal structure of ‘schooling’ staggers forward in name only.
The crisis does not stop at protests. At the administrative level, the dysfunction is almost theatrical. Directors in charge of education departments feud among themselves, each busy displaying authority rather than exercising responsibility. Bribery continues to plague routine operations. Monitoring at the field level has evaporated, leaving schools and colleges to operate as they please. And then there is the textbook fiasco: this year’s books arrived late, and next year’s may not arrive at all. Printing has not started for most classes, while procurement disputes delay the rest. The prospect of another academic year beginning without books looms large. When the foundation of learning — access to textbooks — cannot be ensured, what else needs to be said about the state of education?
In moments like this, it is tempting to demand that the government of the day step in, provide solutions and bring calm. But herein lies the first layer of complexity: we do not currently have an elected government. The interim administration is, by definition, temporary. Its mandate is not to redesign the architecture of education, or to resolve decades of accumulated grievances across every rung of the academic ladder. Its mandate is almost singular: to create a climate conducive to credible elections.
To expect the interim government to solve the grievances of teachers, students, administrators and bureaucrats is to expect it to operate outside its legitimacy. The protests, however justifiable, seem to forget this constitutional boundary. If the interim authority begins to accede to every demand — be it salary increments, institutional nationalisation or infrastructure development — then it risks not only overstepping its role but also making commitments that no one can guarantee will survive. Because any elected government, once in office with the legitimacy of a popular mandate, retains the power to alter, amend or outright cancel decisions made in the interim period. To anchor national policy in temporary hands is to build on shifting sand.
This is not to say that grievances should be dismissed. Teachers struggling on meagre salaries, or students enduring crumbling infrastructure, do not deserve silence. But there is a hierarchy of urgency. When an interim government stretches itself too thin — attempting to fulfil every sector’s demands — it risks distracting from its central responsibility: ensuring elections that restore legitimate governance. Without that restoration, even the most generous concessions are meaningless, because the next government may reverse them.
The tragedy is that education cannot wait, yet it must wait. It cannot wait because every day of disruption erodes the already fragile learning culture of the country. When students find more reliability in private coaching centres than in their schools, when exams become the only measure of education, when books fail to arrive, we are not merely experiencing inconvenience — we are living through the quiet burial of an entire generation’s intellectual promise. But it must wait because the authority to structurally transform education lies only in the hands of an elected government.
Rasheda K Chowdhury, a seasoned voice in education reform, has rightly pointed out that printing books or tweaking curriculums will not bring transformation. Transformation requires a vision that sees students not as examination candidates but as future citizens, moral beings and thinking individuals. That vision cannot come from a caretaker team whose horizon extends only until the ballot boxes are closed. It must come from a government with the courage — and the legitimacy — to chart a course over decades, not months.
So where does that leave us? In limbo. Students will continue to pour into streets, teachers into rallies and administrators into petty quarrels. Education will continue its hibernation. The danger is that in this state of suspended animation, we normalise paralysis. We begin to believe that an entire nation’s learning system can survive on protests, strikes, coaching centres and deferred promises. But survival is not the same as growth. Survival, at best, is stagnation.
The real test, then, is not whether the interim government can pacify every stakeholder with short-term fixes. The real test will come once an elected government assumes office. Will it treat education as an emergency sector in need of long-term rescue? Will it have the moral and political will to break free from the cycle of temporary adjustments, and instead design a system where teachers are respected, students are nurtured and administrators are held accountable? Or will it simply inherit the inertia of its predecessors, occasionally raising salaries or shifting grades, while the core of education remains hollow?
At this juncture, the country stands at a crossroads. One path leads to continuing the endless charade of protests and partial concessions, a cycle that consumes energies without producing solutions. The other path requires patience, painful as it may be, to wait for a government that bears the people’s mandate to bring structural reform. In between, there is little room for miracles.
We should, therefore, remind ourselves that the present chaos is not a crisis to be solved by a caretaker regime. It is a symptom of decades of neglect and half-measures. To demand full-fledged reform from a temporary government is to miss the point. The interim government must keep the classrooms from collapsing entirely — by ensuring functionality, preventing violence and guaranteeing that examinations and admissions do not disintegrate. Beyond that, the task is not theirs. The responsibility belongs to the next elected government, and to the citizens who will decide which leadership to entrust with the sleeping giant of our education system.
Until then, education will remain in hibernation. The question is whether we will awaken it in time, or whether we will one day find that the long slumber has quietly turned into a permanent coma.
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HM Nazmul Alam is an academic, journalist and political analyst.
