Curriculum and educational content
Religious schools, social values and economic attitudes: evidence from Bangladesh
The impacts of a madrasa reform programme, Bangladesh
Authors:
M. N. Asadullah; N. Chaudhury
Publisher:
Department of International Development (Queen Elizabeth House), University of Oxford, 2006
This paper examines the social impact of a madrasa (Islamic religious school) reform programme in Bangladesh. The key features of the reform were a change of the curriculum and introduction of female teachers. The authors assess whether the reform has made any contribution in improving social cohesion in rural areas. They use new data on teachers and female graduates from rural Bangladesh and explore how attitudes toward desired fertility, working mothers, higher education for girls vis-à-vis boys, and various political regimes vary across secondary schools and modernised madrasas.
The report finds some evidence of attitudinal gaps by school type. Modernised religious education is associated with attitudes that are conducive to democracy. On the other hand, when compared to their secular schooled peers, madrasa graduates have adverse attitudes on matters such as working mothers, desired fertility and higher education for girls. The authors also find that young people’s attitudes are interlinked with that of their teachers. Exposure to female and younger teachers leads to more favourable attitudes among graduates. These estimated effects are robust to conditioning on a rich set of individual, family and school traits.
