Before May Day Comes again

Published on: May 1, 2026

12-year-old Rafi, as a child, used to do something very different every morning compared to what he does now. He would dress up and walk to a classroom, sit with his peers and spend the day at school. Now, he starts his day in a factory. For him, the school has become a rustic chamber full of hazardous machinery and full-grown adults have replaced his once beloved peers. When schools closed during the COVID pandemic, Rafi went to work for his family - and in doing so, left school. The schools reopened without Rafi. He never went back.

In 2022, TIME captured Rafi's quiet exit from a path that might have taken him to a different future. But what is more unsettling is the fact that Rafi is not alone. It is part of a silent trend in Bangladesh where millions of children, particularly in the early grades, are withdrawn from school - not always voluntarily, but certainly out of need.

Rafi's story leads us to a really tough question: how many children have similarly dropped out of school? Over the last few decades, Bangladesh has achieved tremendous gains in access to primary schooling. Schools have become full, literacy rates have improved, and the stories of progress have been showcased everywhere. But alongside these success stories lies another story - one that is not being told, one that is less visible. In 2024 alone, there was a startling rise in the primary school dropout rate to 16.25 percent, as reported by The Daily Star.

For children like these, dropout is just a formal term to address their disappearances. In reality, schooling just disappears from their lives - slowly, subtly. It becomes a distant memory as financial realities take precedence over academic possibilities.

The Dropouts We Do Not See

The crisis is not always necessarily reflected in the official dropout stats. It lies between attendance and absence - of children who are still technically in school, but are progressively less engaged in the learning process.

The Bangladesh Bureau of Statistics (2015) and ILO (2021) estimate that millions of Bangladeshi children are involved in various forms of work and many juggle work and schooling simultaneously. We need to realize that to such children, education never just stops one fine morning but it gradually becomes a lesser priority. One missed class becomes regular absence, homework is substituted with some sort of income generating activity and eventually the classroom becomes irrelevant to their real lives before they even know it.

And this is where the concept of the dropout gets very misleading. To be effectively out of school, a child does not necessarily have to actually drop out of school. Fatigue instead of concentration, worries of empty plates instead of undone homeworks, crisis overriding schooling - the system loses them long before their names are erased off the register.

According to UNICEF, such invisible exclusion is seen especially among children belonging to families with low-incomes, urban slum areas and rural populations - where children are exposed to economic vulnerability at a very early stage of their lives and thus pushed toward informal work - unprepared. They get caught between a brutal battle between schooling and providing for family where unfortunately schooling almost never wins.

Access Is Not Inclusion

One thing a lot of us fail to comprehend is that the crisis does not necessarily involve the deprivation of children from access to education. The issue at stake is the way they are slowly pushed out of it. Exclusion tends to take place through small, nearly unnoticeable ways such as when nobody cares about a child randomly skipping classes, missing out or lagging behind on learning, and when classrooms accelerate without those who cannot keep up.

Children coming from economically vulnerable backgrounds carry burdens that cannot go side by side with the strict schooling framework that expects stability in the lives of children. Lack of that stability leads to the system providing minimal to no flexibility and compassion. Accept it or not, this only means that these ill-fated children are often not withdrawn - but left behind.

Inclusion does not merely mean enrollment but the capability of staying, engaging and moving and growing along. Under these circumstances, where education systems do not yet realize and act on the realities of vulnerable children, exclusion is inherently entrenched in the system itself.

The Promises That Were Not Kept

The education policies of Bangladesh have long been declared to have achieved universal access, better retention, and safeguarding of the vulnerable children. On paper, the promises shine and collect rounds of applause when it comes to showcasing success stories on global platforms. But in reality, there are countless loopholes between the will and the deed. Programs to decrease dropout do not recognize the situations of children at the grassroots who work and study simultaneously. There are financial support schemes, but they prove to be inadequate or inaccessible during crisis periods by many families.

Children have been pushed out of classrooms due to economic vulnerability despite existing policy initiatives as emphasized in recent UNICEF assessments. The recognition of the problem was never missing, but a coordinated response that connects education, social protection and labor realities is yet to be enforced. Until that happens, even though frustrating to admit, the promise of ensuring inclusive education risks remaining just that - a promise.

Tomorrow’s Workforce, Lost Today

When children are edged out of school, the damage impacts far beyond just the individual lives of these children or their families. It reinvents the economic future of a nation. Nations that fail to sustain the foundational learning are losing crucial productivity potential because a large portion of the labor pool grows up to be incompetent for the modern economy, as repeatedly demonstrated by the World Bank.

This in Bangladesh translates into a less prepared, less adaptable and less competitive workforce. What starts as a temporary survival mechanism of a family, quietly turns out to be a long-term expense for the whole country. And I am afraid that it is a cost that Bangladesh cannot afford, but must still bear in silence.

Before May Day Comes Again

If thousands of stories like Rafi’s mean anything to us, they must lead us toward solutions which acknowledge the realities that children are faced with. We need to wake up and see that more than policy intent is needed to bridge schooling and survival. It requires flexibility - a critical element of inclusion. Cash transfers and stipends should be delivered to the most vulnerable families consistently, whereas schools should have flexible schedules and ways of accommodating children unable to adhere to a strict framework.

To locate the children who are at risk before they are completely out of the picture, community-based tracking and support systems may come in handy. Meanwhile, tougher enforcement of law against child labour should be accompanied by the establishment of alternative economic prospects for the families in need.

Inclusion in education is, therefore, not a far-off dream - it is more like a constant practice of keeping children connected to learning despite the adversities. It is in these everyday efforts that the true value of education is either safeguarded or quietly lost. May Day returns every year to celebrate the dignity of labor but for some, the story begins too early and at the cost of something that they may never reclaim.