I am sitting in a hotel room in Islamabad, reading a recent Bonik Barta report that makes a compelling argument: that madrasa education has become the affordable architecture of hope for many families as public schooling keeps losing trust and private schooling remains expensive. We have already visited over 10 universities in Pakistan as part of a high-profile delegation. In each institution, we have noticed how faith is respected without compromising the future. The technological, entrepreneurial and future-orientated higher education landscape we witnessed cannot be attained without orienting the primary and secondary supply chains towards future readiness.
Discourses on madrasa education adhere to the binary of modern versus religious, secularism versus spirituality, and the Western model of schooling versus traditional madrasa. But what is amiss is not the theological component but its economic factors. The binary pivots on affordability. The educational choice of students is made by families, as they probably find it cheaper to enrol their children in affordable, often charitable institutions, with the hope that such a decision will pay off in the afterlife.
Madrasa education, however, is not one single story. Alia madrasas are attracting students because their curriculum now appears closer to general education, while Qawmi madrasas are drawing many poor families in because they are cheaper and, often, provide food, boarding, discipline, and supervision. Another Bonik Barta report from 2024 notes that Alia madrasa enrolment reached the highest in two decades, rising to around 40.2 lakh in 2022 from around 38.06 lakh in 2019. During the same time, the Qawmi madrasa board recorded an increase of nearly 100,000 students.
The spirit of non-discrimination with which political changes were welcomed nearly two years ago is dampened by an educational market trend that is sorting children by class. For one group of parents, Alia madrasas offer a hybrid promise: the same or similar textbooks as schools, with additional religious instruction. For another group, Qawmi madrasas offer something even more basic: a place where a child can be fed, housed, watched, and educated at a cost the family can bear. The report’s most telling anecdote is that of a working mother who sends her child to a nearby madrasa because she leaves home in the morning, returns in the evening, and has no one to look after him. The madrasa becomes a school plus daycare with food for both body and soul.
This anecdote involving the mother should make the state ask why education choice is tied to a survival decision. At the same time, the authorities must try to discern why government primary schools are losing confidence. The Annual Primary School Census 2023 data reported by The Daily Star shows that total primary-level enrolment fell from around 2.05 crore students in 2022 to about 1.97 crore in 2023. Government primary schools alone lost more than 10 lakh students. During the same period, kindergarten enrolment increased from about 46 lakh to around 48.7 lakh. Educationists cited financial hardship and movement to Qawmi madrasas as among the reasons for the fall.
The architecture of disparity is obvious: children from the upper middle class enter English medium schools, while children from the aspirational middle class enter private kindergartens. Children from lower middle class or poor background go wherever the fee is manageable and the food is available. These are class destinies that we pretend to overlook.
The argument is not against madrasa education. Bangladesh’s religious learning traditions are deep, and many madrasa students have gone on to universities, professional fields, and public life. The Alia madrasa authorities have updated the curricula to have computer labs, science labs, and pathways to higher education at home and abroad. If a madrasa student learns Bangla, English, mathematics, science, Arabic, ethics, digital literacy, communication, financial literacy, and civic responsibility, society gains a rooted and capable citizen. The issue here is not faith, but unequal futures.
We should not encourage any system—whether it is a madrasa, government school or a private English medium institution—that promotes memorisation without comprehension, devotion without employability, modernity without ethics, or certificates without competence. Our access to and spread of education is lauded by Unesco. Its 2026 report notes that primary completion increased from 34 percent in 1990 to 90 percent in 2024, while lower-secondary completion rose from 23 percent to 74 percent. But completion is not the true measure of learning or job readiness.
The neat data is dented by NEET (Not in Education, Employment or Training) findings of the World Bank, which show 27 percent of Bangladeshi youth (around 1.26 crore people) in an oblivion. Of them, 90 percent are female and are mostly from rural areas. While we keep chanting “demographic dividend” as a development mantra, millions of our youth remain undereducated, undertrained, and underemployed. And the much-vaunted demographic window is likely to narrow around 2040. That means the child entering school today will come of age just as the window begins to close. A demographic dividend without skills is not a dividend but a liability.
The reform we need must therefore begin with one principle: every child in Bangladesh, regardless of stream, must receive a guaranteed foundation of learning. The stream may differ; the entitlement cannot. A child in a Qawmi madrasa, Alia madrasa, government primary school, NGO school, kindergarten, English version school, or English medium school must have access to literacy, numeracy, science, digital skills, communication, health awareness, civic ethics, and pathways to future work. Such access requires courage from the state. Government primary schools must be rescued from the stigma of last resort. That will require teacher accountability, continuous professional development, school meals, safe classrooms, active parent engagement, digital learning support, and honest assessment of learning outcomes.
It also requires humility from policymakers. Madrasa modernisation should not be pursued as cultural correction but as educational justice. Madrasa students don’t need condescension. They need modern amenities and bridges to technical and higher education. The gap between different streams must be narrowed. Private institutions must be brought into a rational accountability framework. The state cannot regulate the poor and pamper the rich. The Pakistan visit reminds me that higher education reform cannot begin at the university gate. By then, too many inequalities have already hardened. Upskilling and reskilling must become national habits, but they must rest on a school system that does not abandon children at the beginning.
The madrasa question is not about religion and curriculum alone. It’s also about the price of schooling, the collapse of public trust, the hidden cost of private aspiration, and the social sorting of childhood. When education becomes too expensive for the poor and too unequal for the nation, madrasa growth becomes not an aberration but a symptom.
Dr Shamsad Mortuza is vice-chancellor at the University of Liberal Arts Bangladesh (ULAB).
Views expressed in this article are the author's own.
Follow The Daily Star Opinion on Facebook for the latest opinions, commentaries, and analyses by experts and professionals. To contribute your article or letter to The Daily Star Opinion, see our guidelines for submission.
