As a student, I learnt the proverb “A bad workman fights with
his tools”. To me, it appears the decision to reduce the syllabus by 50 percent
is like clicking your camera when the target is totally out of focus. The problems that haunt the school system are
many and they need to be addressed. Mere window dressing will be totally a myopic
proposition.
1.
Yes,
the syllabus needs to be pruned to be relevant, contextual and futuristic.
2.
The
syllabus should support the vision of the Government to develop learners with
skill sets which will help them to be active participants with better
employability skills.
3. The
syllabus needs to be broad-based to sensitize them to constitutional responsibilities
understanding the basic of democratic norms appreciating social equity and
justice.
4.
The
syllabus should help them to be open-minded, thinking individuals rather than
intellectual robots digesting and throwing out the printed letters from any
given book.
5.
The
syllabus should help them to enjoy learning, triggering their interest to get
back to their schools for the next day.
6.
The
syllabus should enrich the scientific temper catalyzing curiosity for
exploration and research.
And may be a little more.
But then, will cutting the syllabus by 50 percent achieve all
these ends? This takes us to examine the
vary basics of the process of learning as envisaged by the neuro-cognitive
psychologists. Recent researches have proved that learning is a neural net-work
and hence the role of a school is to create ambience and opportunities for learning,
both formal and informal.
As such, the cognitive psychologists claim that
nearly 90 percent of all learning is informal and only 10 percent is formal.
Hence the role of schools is to bring synergy between formal learning and
informal learning, which possibly was one of the objectives of the Continuous
and Comprehensive Evaluation. Unfortunately, lack of proper administrative
support, denial of adequate freedom to schools due to issues of mistrust, lack
of reach to the teachers and parent to put things in proper perspective
demolished a system which was a valuable recommendation of the National Policy
of Education right from the days of Kothari Commission.
Further, the idea of neuro-plasticity of the
brain repositions several of former theories of learning and our understanding
of how learning takes place. Also, the emergence of a digital world has reset
our approach to the role of memory, both human and otherwise, which call for a
re-engineering of our methods of assessing human performance. Therefore, the
number of chapters in a book, the extent and depth to which the concepts are
delivered and understood depend on various personal and contextual issues. As
such, the syllabus is only a resource and an input for learning. Hence we can
reconsider the resources to make them contextual, relevant and utilitarian for
the emerging society rather than engaging into an exercise of cutting the
quantum.
Learning depends on various factors, both genetic,
environmental, social and cultural.
The
focus should be on scaffolding all these factors so that we can increase our efficiency
and output.
Learning, per se, doesn’t cause much stress. The stress is
caused by several extraneous factors that impact the learner. Right from
childhood, the learner is conditioned to experience the stress, to fulfill the
dreams of the parents, teachers, schools and the society – in the process
depriving the child to dream himself or herself.
Without doing any postmortem on its merits and demerits, it
is important to investigate into a few causes that have infected the learning.
As one, who has been in the field of education since early seventies, I hasten
to make the following observations, just in the interest of a national cause
and not as a reaction to any of the proposals of any agency or the policy
makers.
1.
I
am convinced that the Indian children in schools are in no way inferior to any
of their counterparts worldwide.
2.
Their
learning capacities and ability to handle challenges are exemplary provided
with appropriate support.
3.
The
school systems, both at the central and the state levels, have failed to attend
to educational needs with the seriousness they deserve.
4.
The
root of the problems lies in the following:
a. Excessive focus on terminal
examinations
b. Inadequate infrastructural support to
schools
c. Inability to raise the quality of
government schools
d. Poor quality of teacher education and further
training
Over and above, these the social and family pressure on
children for performance, targets and results have brought in unhealthy competitive
drive among schools, thus leading to competitive branding and market economies
in school and higher education sectors. One of the most important measures to
be taken to diffuse this situation is “parental education” to make them
understand that “learning is an enjoyable experience”; “learning has an
emotional content”; “ “learning is synergizing the mental, emotional and
physical health of the individual for a happy living”; “in a society with fast
changing knowledge systems and skills, the students need to be thinking
individuals and not be ‘addicted’ to perform in examinations to get numbers”
and “social intelligence is critical to growth as much as any other
intelligence”
All these and more, need a revolutionary insight into the
philosophies of running educational systems.
Back to syllabus, it is like a runway for an aircraft to take
off. The students should use the syllabus and text books for their onward
journey to newer horizons of experience, adventure and entertainment to
understand the world and people in real terms. If an aerodrome doesn’t have
adequate aircrafts to take off, we don’t cut the runway by 50 percent as good
enough. The logistics defeat the core purpose of the educational objectives.
We need a holistic vision, supported by positive
and focused strategies to put the school education back on track
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