Education Adviser Prof Wahiduddin Mahmud yesterday said the new curriculum, especially the evaluation method, does not seem to be implementable.
“Implementation of the new curriculum with existing teachers is tough… In many cases, this new curriculum is not suitable for our country,” Wahiduddin said while talking to reporters at his secretariat office.
“We will return to the previous curriculum as much as possible. But it will be done in such a way that students don’t feel any discomfort and no discontinuity is created,” he added.
Wahiduddin, an economist and Dhaka University professor, yesterday went to the education ministry for the first time after taking the oath of office on Friday.
He said the transition from the new curriculum to the old one would be a complex job, as many students already had books of the new curriculum.
“If we go back to the old curriculum, we will keep links to the new one,” he said.
Wahiduddin said the whole job will be done in phases.
He made the remarks at a time when many educationists criticised the new curriculum for a sketchy evaluation system.
Besides, due to a lack of sufficient training, many teachers were still confused about how to give classroom instructions, distribute group work for students, and evaluate the students’ performances based on the new curriculum.
The last Awami League government chalked out the new curriculum, saying it would reduce emphasis on memorisation and prioritise experimentation and activity-based learning.
Phase-wise implementation of the curriculum started on January 1, 2023. Currently, the curriculum is followed in classes one, two, three, six, seven, eight, and nine, while classes four, five, and 10 are supposed to follow it from January 2025.
Under the new curriculum, there will be no public exam before class 10 and no exams for students up to class 3. Science, humanities, and business studies will be introduced in class 11 instead of class 9.
