I wanted to be an automobile engineer. I had some pretty interesting ideas about alternative energy sources when I was a student at the Notre Dame College. I dreamt that being an engineer would put me in the right position to work on those ideas. That did not happen. Why? My teacher did not think that I had the ability. The ability they talked about is reproducing exactly what is taught in the classroom. I asked a lot of questions about the abstract concepts of Mathematics while most of my classmates were satisfied with just getting the problems solved. I aced in physics but could not do well in Mathematics, so I could not get the chance to study engineering. I chose an alternative career. I studied education especially curriculum and pedagogy which is the art and science of teaching. While doing that over the years a realization struck me. The dominant culture of our education is concerned with memorizing and reproducing facts and concepts rather than understanding, analytical ability and creativity. This phenomenon is directed by our age-old assessment system which is designed to assess only how much a student can reproduce what he or she has memorized. The general argument supporting the current assessment system is that many brilliant people are coming out off that system and they are doing great in life. But what is the percentage of that? Much of people’s brilliance depends on the nurturing they get during childhood and through their education. Majority of the students in a SSC or HSC batch are of average ability. It is the responsibility of the education system to nurture them and unlock their potential. While we are generalizing the exceptional cases these average students are being left behind. How do we know that they don’t have the potentials? Child and educational psychology show that every child is different and every one has different learning styles and speed. The job of the teacher is to create an environment where every student will have the opportunity to flourish. Given our economic condition it is difficult to provide enough teachers for our large student population. However, what can be done is to provide equal attention to every student. A common practice in our country is giving attention to only the students who do well in the exams (memorizing and reproducing actually). At this point people working in the field of education in Bangladesh may disagree with me. But I have substantial experience of researching classroom practice in our country and also in a developed country like UK. Research shows that teachers tend to teach the way they were taught as students. As our teachers in primary and secondary schools were taught in traditional way they tend to apply the same approach in teaching. The traditional way of teaching is like a transmission model where knowledge and information is transferred to the students. It is more like pouring water in to empty vessels. This teaching practice is coupled with drill and practice of mathematical problems, memorizing answers to large question banks which are likely to appear in the exams. So what we are assessing at the end? We are assessing the ability to reproduce; not the higher order skills. A very prominent educational psychologist Dr. Benjamin Bloom theorized the ‘Taxonomy of Educational objectives’ which builds on domains of learning. There are three domains of learning – cognitive, psychomotor and affective. Educational experts all know about this classification. And I don’t want to bore readers with theoretical discussions. Just for a brief psychomotor domain of learning deals with the ability to manipulate tools or physical instruments for accomplishing any given task like using construction materials to build a wall or a hours. The affective domain focuses on people’s actions and reactions regarding emotions, attitudes and aptitudes like awareness about environmental conservation. I will focus on the cognitive part of education as this was my intention for this post. Please look at the diagram. This has been taken from Taxonomy for Learning, Teaching and Assessing: A Revision of Bloom's Taxonomy of Educational Objectives (2001) by Anderson and Krawthwohl. As we can see that, the lowest category is ‘Remember’ which actually refers to memorized knowledge of facts, information, methodology, terminology etc. The ‘Understand’ category is about comprehension of the things learned as knowledge. The ‘Apply’ category is about application of the first two categories. The final category is referred as higher order skills because this tier requires the learner’s efficient acquisition of the first three tiers. It is expected that at this stage learners will be able to efficiently analyze any given problem or situation, evaluate possible solutions and apply creativity to solve problems or issues or endeavour into new ideas. In our national curriculum it is expected that after completing full round of education cycle students will be able to apply or manipulate the higher order skills. However; due to the dominant knowledge-oriented assessment system majority of the students graduating SSC or HSC are likely to accomplish only the lowest tier of learning which is remembering. I am sure that there is a percentage who gains considerable skills of understanding, application, analysis, evaluation and creativity. But as I have mentioned before that they are the exceptional students whom we should not generalize for the whole student population. So what happens when majority of the students is evaluated through knowledge-oriented assessment system? Majority of these students do good results in the public exams and get good grades like ‘Golden GPA’. After that when it comes to higher or further education many of them get dropped out off the admission system as that is a more rigorous system then public exams, although university admission tests are also burdened with knowledge-oriented question items. A few of the technology and engineering institutions has admission process which assess more than memorization. However, even these tests can be aced through rigorous drill and practice. The exceptionally brilliant students get admission whatever the system is but for the vast majority of average students it depends on the ability to drill and practice and memorization. And those who can not cope with this process end up in studying subjects which they never wanted to pursue or they pay exorbitant tuition fees in the private universities. So what is the end result of all of these? Despite having the potential many of the science students struggle to keep up with the advancement of science and technology as resource allocated for research is scarce in the country. In the World Bank Bangladesh Education Sector Review (2000), it is mentioned that “The gap in knowledge between Bangladesh universities and those in advanced countries is widening, particularly in science-based disciplines”. I believe that we have lots of brilliant people in Bangladesh who can effectively contribute to the country’s development. The only things they need are proper nurturing and the opportunity to grow. In the universities we have more positions in humanities, social sciences or general stream subjects than science and technology subjects. Although currently there are a number of private universities in the country, almost of all of these institutions only deal with information technology and computer sciences which requires less investments as many of these subjects can be taught without expensive laboratories. The previously mentioned World Bank review also stated about higher and further education that “The examination system favors factual knowledge over higher-order skills and is subject to widespread unfair practices”. The end result is we get university graduates with good memory-based knowledge but inadequate higher-order skills. The number of exceptional graduates is very low and as there is not enough opportunity for them to flourish many of them either choose other career paths or leave to developed countries. The vast majority of generalist graduates also move in to careers which they did not think of on the first place. The reality is we do not have the right people in the right place. We are loosing the opportunity to get the best out of human-capital. Since 1950 the economical gap between developed and developing countries is widely focused issue. This gap is affecting Bangladesh in many ways as we have a large population in a small land area which lacks in natural resources to invest in. What we have in abundance is the human capital. Although we are getting external financial assistance without adequate skilled manpower economic growth is becoming more difficult. We are compelled to hire skilled manpower from outside to do jobs which our people should have accomplished effectively if they had the proper learning environment to grow. We need to come out of this situation. Public exams like SSC and HSC need to be designed to assess students’ higher-order skills. This would enable teaches and students to focus more on higher tiers of learning domains rather than concentrating on memorizing and reproducing. There are many obstacles to introducing that kind of teaching, which all the big thinkers of our education know about. A major obstacle is getting people out of the comfort zone. The government has been trying to induce student-centric constructivist teaching approach through the teacher education programmes. However, when teachers go for actual teaching in the classrooms they tend to return to age-old practice of transferring knowledge and encourage memorizing, drill and practice. It is human nature to resist against new ideas and approaches. Proper developmental work research in this area can improve teaching practices. Teacher education programmes in our country need to acknowledge and address the contrasting experiences which student-teachers bring along in the teacher education programmes. Recently creative questioning has been introduced in the SSC exams; however an easy way around this has already been devised. Most of the book stalls are flooded with notes and guide books which provide vast array of possible questions and answers. This has to stop. Grading system has also been introduced but as the practice of assessment is same as before the end result also remains same. We still have the Norm-referenced test (NRT) system. NRT actually assesses a student’s achievement and position in relation to other students. To harness best out off grading system we need to introduce Criterion-referenced test (CRT) system in our public exams. CRT gives test scores of a student in relation to his/her mastery of a given subject. Our curriculum is competency based and students’ achievement is best assessed by CRT. Significant effort is given to further develop and modify the curriculum but other than introducing creative questioning and grading system the nature of public exam is still the same. The core of this system needs to be changed if we want to get best out off the national curriculum. I started this write-up with my own experiences of education. To some it may seem like bragging but I need to let the readers know what happened to the ideas I hatched. What seemed like an outrageous design came into reality in 2003, but not by me. BMW (a famous German Automaker) started using hydrogen to fuel cars as today we use CNG to run cars in Bangladesh. They say it will be the fuel of the future. This kind of developmental work could have been done in Bangladesh if there was proper opportunity. It could save us a lot of money and our precious natural gas. There numerous other people who have many bright ideas which can contribute to the country’s development and economic growth. We need to come out off our traditional practice and embrace a more humanistic approach to education. Our bright youth is our capital for development and they need a favourable platform to work.