An output of the EdTech Hub, https://edtechhub.org

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Bangladesh adheres to the principles and values of respecting cultural, religious, and ethnic diversities and has enriched school textbooks for meeting demands of the society and preparing young generations as much as possible for future with adequate facts, well-known perspectives and diverse worldviews. School textbooks are one of the critical instruments of preparing young generations for future—with the values of respect, tolerance, mutual understanding, cooperation, unity, prosperity, partnership and humanity. However, sometimes textbooks could produce counter-productive outcomes if contents were not developed with well-thoughts and prudence. They also constitute a compulsion for a country to realise how the young children could be prepared with the values of maintaining and ensuring peace, accepting cultural diversity, and respecting the ethos of peaceful coexistence of multi-ethnic and multi-religious communities living in a society. As an elementary level effort, this paper has focused on some selective secondary level textbooks in Bangladesh to understand how the issues of cultural diversity and peaceful coexistence have been represented. There has been a plenty of textbook contents described and touched on the aspects of cultural diversity in various ways to enlighten students about pluralism and values of social cohesion. However, a more delicate and detailed presentation of some issues could help students socialisation process and of learning about respecting and accepting the diversity of all kinds better. Some more visual representations of diverse cultures and practices, and more practical tasks on valuing rights, dignity, tolerance, and empathy could benefit them further. Nonetheless, there is an essence of having skilled and qualified teachers who could play sincere roles in teaching such values in appropriate educational environments. Social Science Review, Vol. 37(2), Dec 2020 Page 59-86

The study has made an effort to analyze the performance of Bangladesh economy in line with the decent work and inclusive economic growth target of Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) for the period of 2015 to 2019 and to identify the challenges of achieving decent work for all by 2030. Bangladesh has ranked 109 th among the 166 countries and moved seven notches up from 116 th of 2019 in the SDGs Index 2020. Analyzing the International Labour Organization (ILO) modeled estimated data on the decent work indicators like labour force participation rate, employment to population ratio, unemployment rate, youth unemployment, informal employment, child labour and employment in agriculture, industry and service sector, the study reveals that the high youth unemployment, informality in the job market, mismatch between demand and supply of skilled labour, less female participation in the labour force, insufficient investment, participation of child and forced labour in hazardous work, etc. are the major hindrance for ensuring decent work for all. Skill development programs, large scale investment, products diversification, good governance, elimination of child and forced labour from hazardous work, etc. may help to create more employment opportunities, decent work environment as well as inclusive and sustainable economic growth in Bangladesh.