Students caught in 18 years of curriculum flip-flops, as another big change is weighed for 2028
Thousands of students in Bangladesh have spent the past 18 years caught in repeated changes to the curriculum, textbooks, teaching methods and assessment system. The New Age newspaper's lead report said one government after another has introduced education reforms and then scrapped them before properly checking whether they worked, leaving students to pay the price.
The report cited Musab Rahman, a student at a school in Dhaka, as an example. In January 2024 he enrolled in Class 9 under the new continuous-assessment-based curriculum introduced by the then Awami League government.
Under that curriculum, the traditional science, humanities and business studies streams in the Class 9 and Class 10 syllabus were abolished at the secondary level.
But after the fall of the Awami League government, the interim government scrapped the curriculum in September 2024 and announced a return to the 2012 curriculum from the following academic year.
Two different national curricula within two years disrupted the preparation of Musab and his classmates for the 2026 SSC examination, the report said.
According to the report, Musab is one of thousands of students who have faced such repeated changes over a long period.
The government is now considering another major change to the curriculum in 2028, which has raised fresh concern about the future direction of the education system.
Educationists say the absence of a coherent national education philosophy, long-term planning and institutional continuity has turned curriculum-making into a cycle of political experimentation, in which students have effectively become experimental subjects.
