Illuminating the Shadow Education Mechanism of Neoliberal Governmentality in Bangladesh

The Bangladeshi secondary education sub-sector is dominated by non-state actors—98.8% of all secondary schools are managed by non-state organizations (World Bank, Bangladesh engaging the private sector in education systems approach for better education results (SABER). World Bank Group, 2016). Along with private schooling, a ubiquitous privately financed form of education across South Asia is private tutoring, also known as shadow education. In Bangladesh, 80% of tenth graders are estimated to be participating in private tutoring (Bray & Lykins, Shadow education: Private supplementary tutoring and its implications for policy makers in Asia. Asian Development Bank / Comparative Education Research Centre, The University of Hong Kong, 2012). Bangladeshi scholars underscore that private tutoring has become deeply entrenched and, “a common phenomenon in Bangladeshi education…implemented at all stages of pre-tertiary education” (Hamid et al., TESOL Quarterly, 43, 281–308, 2009). Through a heavy reliance on the market and focus on privatization, tentacles of the neoliberal political project have been felt throughout Bangladesh’s economy and governing structures (Kabir, Policy Futures in Education, 8(6), 619–631, 2010). There has also been a shift in the rationalities of governing through non-state institutions. Considering how much of secondary education provision is undertaken by non-state actors, this chapter employs Alam’s (Governmentality and counter-hegemony in Bangladesh. Palgrave Macmillan, 2015) approach to neoliberal governmentality, of power “beyond the state”, which allows social hierarchies to be unbounded from that of a nation-state. This chapter then undertakes a political economy analysis of how private tutoring education is a reflection of neoliberal governmentality and globalization, while weaving in literature on non-state actors within the context of Bangladesh’s colonial past and postcolonial present. The chapter also discusses how private tutoring education can be seen as a technology of the self, specifically that of responsibilization. This connects to how the Bangladeshi state response to tutoring has been quite austere, with the 2016 Education Act banning private tutoring centres, but that this response lacks any credible teeth. Given that accountability and effective monitoring takes extensive resources, a strategy to mandate a ban but not do anything else is arguably a cost-effective governing approach for the state, a strategy that this chapter argues portends with the technology of responsibilization. Thus, our social order is reconfigured to produce highly individualized, responsibilized citizens who are encouraged to foster a competitive entrepreneurial identity, which includes seeking out increasing amounts of private tutoring, earlier and earlier in their education.