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Linking Young Minds Together
     Volume 2 Issue 14| April 4, 2010|


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Feature

The Missing Link

Mohammad Mashnun Hossain

'BEWARE of the students from English medium. These people are really tricky. To get their job done they can do anything!' I was dumbstruck when I heard this. I looked at the speaker, an apparently jolly person. He was my newly met friend. He was talking to another friend of mine who attended a Bengali medium school. What amused me at that time was that the speaker himself attended an English medium school. Yet he was bashing the students of English medium. This piece of advice was given because he thought students from Bengali medium were too simple to understand the complex nature of English medium students!

The moral of the story can be interpreted as follows- people from English medium and Bengali medium have obscure and ignorant ideas about each other. This gives birth to predetermined notions such as being too tricky or being too simple depending on the side you look from. The story here represents one of the weakest sides of our education system- failure to unite the different mediums. When parents choose schools for their children, the choice is made according to the parents' preference. What is unique is that in most cases, these students do not have any opportunity to mix with students from other mediums at any level. Twelve years is a long time and during this phase, most of the students remain completely ignorant about the existence of other mediums. If this is the scenario then how can we expect to build a united Bangladesh?

That is why we should encourage students to communicate with peers from other mediums. We need to create a link so that students from different mediums can exchange their views. In this way they will get the opportunity to know each other. For instance, organizing a discussion circle where students from different mediums can voice their opinion is not a difficult task to implement. It can be an effective step to reduce the differences among the students from various backgrounds.

If we want to create a positive influence on the society, we have to start our work with the school students because they will be the leaders of tomorrow. If the students from different backgrounds can get a common platform to share their stories, they will make a world of difference for our country in future. That is where the power of communication lies. That is where the missing link in our education lies.

(The writer is a student of Economics at North South University).


 

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