Education Minister Urges Compassion for Students Facing SSC Setbacks

Education and Primary and Mass Education Minister Dr. A N M Ehsanul Hoque Milon has urged parents to offer love and encouragement to students who struggled in the recently published Secondary School Certificate examinations. Speaking on Tuesday, August 11, at the BARK Auditorium in Dhaka, he emphasized that a single examination setback does not determine a student's entire future.

The minister questioned whether society's obsession with GPA-5 truly reflects genuine learning and student comprehension. He noted that true evaluation should focus on learning methodologies and knowledge retention rather than solely chasing top-tier grades.

Turning to recent campus developments, Dr. Milon criticized premature student protests at Dhaka University, Jahangirnagar University, and Jagannath University. He explained that unauthorized or leaked segments of internal meeting discussions regarding managing committees for MPO teachers were published before official review and gazette notification, triggering unwarranted agitation.

The minister also highlighted deep-seated structural challenges within the country's education sector, detailing alarming vacancy statistics. Primary schools currently face an acute shortage of 38,000 headmasters, while government educational institutions suffer a shortage of 12,000 teachers.

This brings the total teacher deficit in primary schools to 50,000, alongside a massive shortage of 77,000 teachers in MPO-enlisted schools and colleges. Dr. Milon stressed that these systemic deficits are long-standing institutional issues rather than developments of the past five months, a reality that media professionals must recognize.