Mahfuz Anam, editor and publisher of The Daily Star, delivered a stark warning on Bangladesh’s declining education standards at the Bay of Bengal Conversation 2025, organized by the Centre for Governance Studies (CGS). He said the country is jeopardizing its long-term future by failing to invest in knowledge, research and basic educational quality.
“Our education system is really one of the worst that we have,” Anam said. “The quality of our primary and secondary level students and even the tertiary level is really non-competitive.”
He criticized successive governments for neglecting foundational learning. “I have never been able to understand why governments after governments after government do not improve the quality of our primary [and] secondary education,” he said.
Anam said universities, particularly private institutions, are expanding physically but falling short academically. “There is a serious need to question what is the level of our graduates, what is the level of our postgraduate,” he said. He added that the country is hurting itself through weak scholarship. “A very significant indication of how we are harming ourselves is our inadequate investment in research.”
Pointing to China’s example, he said Bangladesh continues to ignore the link between national development and academic rigor. “The transformation of China, so much of it was banked on education, on research. Why don’t we do it?” he said.
Anam urged policymakers to recognize that the global economy rewards knowledge, not military strength or financial might. “Bangladesh’s future will have to be in the knowledge economy,” he said. “Unless we really put our attention to that, we will be slaves of the future.”
He said Bangladesh’s only real competitive advantage lies in human capability. “When we compete with the world we can’t compete with money or military or anything like that,” he said. “The only area where we can compete is knowledge, is skill, is maturity, is sobriety.”
He also warned that disinformation is eroding the very resource the country needs most. “There is almost like a funding of hatred, funding of misleading information, funding of lies,” he said. “Our most important resource is knowledge, skill, experience.”