India has 28 states and 7 union territories following there own method of education at primary, secondary and tertiary level. There are numerous governing boards; we can say confidently that each state has at least one board for framing the policy and syllabus for education. There are 42 Boards of school education recognized by Council of boards of School Education in India.
Please refer the URL http://www.du.ac.in/du/school_education.pdf for the list
The biggest problem of such a diversified system of education is that the quality of education varies from state to state and within a state depending upon the board of education. There is no common platform to evaluate the students in the country. The content of the subjects like science, math vary and in many cases it is found to be outdated and not in tandem with the recent developments in those fields.
The other key drawback of the system is that the students are expected to memorize the formulae and apply it without teaching them how and why the formula is used.
To aggravate the problem further, the government schools particularly in rural areas don’t have teachers in required numbers and many of the existing teachers are not of standard.
Recently, the government has done away with the 10th board exam in CBSE citing the reason of reducing stress on students, they have made this optional. This will be of little help in improving the knowledge of the students given the existing system of education.
There is more than one way to reduce the stress of the students who take board exams rather than making it optional. A few suggestions are as follows:
1. Increase the duration of examination from 3 hrs to 4 hrs so that students can breathe easy and complete the exam comfortably.
2. Keep the duration of the exam as 3 hrs but reduce the amount of questions in exam
3. Provide ample gap between one exam and another; provide 3 day break between exams.
4. Make the exam more of objective questions like multiple choice questions; this will reduce the stress of writing scores of pages.
If India has to compete with China and US then it can be achieved only through quality education and competent students and the government’s decision to make the board exam optional will work only against the interest of the nation.
This will result in a society which appreciates complacency, lethargy and mediocrity; this is equivalent to socialism of USSR which failed miserably.
Why the government is worried only about the stress of students who are taking 10th board exam. There are children who train themselves in many other fields like Cricket, Chess, Tennis and other sports.
If we extend the same logic of reducing stress of kids in other fields then there will be no competition for kids till the age of 17; will this help them in winning medals for the country. Country like China identifies kids at the age of 2-3 for developing them for Olympic Games and put them through proper training and of course they are made to complete from the tender age to make them strong.
The government is trying to address the symptoms of the problem rather that the problem itself which is disheartening. The government should take a hard look at the lacuna of the existing education system and take some concrete measure rather than doing some easy window dressing to cover the problem.
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Agree with you on the board exams part. The idea is to reduce stress for students, but by removing class 10th board exams we are allowing them to be non-serious for 2 more years.
ReplyDeleteBoards are perceived to be stressful (and dreadful at times) because schools and parents portray it in a wrong way to kids. Students are more worried about results than the learning they get out of it.
Class 10th board exams are an important milestone in a student's life, and doing away with them completely will deprive the student of an important stepping stone in his life. Ideally, class 10th boards should be made simpler and class 12th boards should be made the ultimate goal to ensure that this phase of maturity in a student passes off without any hiccups.
10th boards provide a challenge to students at an appropriate age in their life (most of them would be around 15 yrs), and they should be allowed to concentrate on the process as well (and not just on the results).
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