Rubaiya Murshed

The new norm for education should be people before profit, not the other way around.

In many countries around the world, girls are not given access to the same educational opportunities as boys.

We need to support children from poorer socio-economic backgrounds.

For a lesson to be effective, capturing and holding the interest of the audience is key

Teaching is one of the noblest things a person can choose to do with their life. But sadly, that’s not the narrative that exists today.

The competition aspect of educational assessment is meant for students to be ranked against their own prior achievement, not against their classmates.

Does “simplifying” the curriculum really guarantee that children will not be able to pace themselves in higher studies?

When a student is in a place of despair, on the brink of taking their own life, what does one do as a teacher?

We need a peak in social consciousness, and not just in our GDP.

Universities should be about creating the next generation of thinkers, right? Even in terms of skills, haven’t we been failing largely?

There is an inherent bias in our thinking when we imagine the aspirations and career trajectories of students from different socio-economic backgrounds.

We rarely think about the fact that individuals studying under different education streams may have different perceptions of what being educated means and may have different educational goals and aspirations.

Today, students are still subjected to, more or less, the same so-called education that we or our seniors experienced.

As I write this, I am overrun with a rush of helplessness. I remember feeling the same way when I was preparing for a keynote presentation on the “Recovery of Covid-19 learning loss” that this writing stems from.

I’ve always wanted to be a PhD student. I love reading and writing and a PhD is literally being facilitated—often with a full scholarship—to think, read and write.

“Won’t you change your birth year?” my class teacher had asked with a confused look. She was processing the paperwork for changed birth years in our class nine cohort, and amidst all the “new” 1992s and 1993s, I was one of the two “original” 1991s left.

June 12—World Day against Child Labour—wasn’t supposed to be just another Friday. It would have been the launch day of my first book, containing stories about street children.

Growing up in a joint family had its perks. For example, there was hardly a chance to get bored. On the rare occasion I did get bored, I vividly remember my mother threatening to make me memorise my time-tables if I complained. It was a much dreaded punishment. It makes me wonder how the children are coping in this pandemic.

As my students entered the exam hall, their faces were a tad bit more tense than usual. I was nervous myself. I would finally find out whether our efforts to make the course different had been a whopping failure.

”It’s going to be a long night,” I thought to myself as I pressed the redial button for the fourth time.