Hyderabad, May 16: The present scenario is quite alarming as the true sense of education is getting extinct and the most of the educational institutions are working like factories to produce results and top rankers rather than scholars who acquire knowledge.
As academicians we know that purpose of education is the all round personality of child.
But present day education is neither imparting the true knowledge of life to be an independent self to face the world boldly nor improving the talents of a child by which one achieve laurels in the field one is interested.
I would like to focus on the two major points incorporated in X Five year Plan 2002-07:
1. Full flowering of potentials of each child through a humanizing / sensitizing education: This stresses on the optimum utilization of child’s potential. In order to do this every educational institution should design their curriculum where there will be complete involvement of all the students enrolled with them.
School curriculum should attempt at making the child a good citizen, who can eventually contribute to social, cultural and economical betterment of the society.
Developing cognitive and critical skills in each child: Every educational institute must structure it’s curriculum to focus primarily on providing essential skills that may be of social and economical use even if they discontinue their schooling for various reasons.
The child at any point of time must be in a position to be independent. Harmonious development of child’s personality in an atmosphere of happiness and love should be the motto of education.
If all the educational institutions and the school managements do understand and follow them by word and spirit, this lamentable situation of running the rat race to produce the results wouldn’t have arise.
We need to appreciate the bold initiative of HRD Minister Kapil Sibal in trying to minimize the pressure on the adolescents by making Grade X Board examination optional.
Certainly it’s an eye opener to all the conventional academicians and aspirant Parents who believed that examination results are the yard sticks to assess the potential of child as well as the schools.
Though there was a huge uproar when he announced this, as a “natural resistance to change by any human being,” educationists started looking into this issue with different perspective and I am sure as true academicians would appreciate his strong strand of de-stressing the whole educational process.
2. The CBSE initiative in introducing Continuous Comprehensive Evaluations (CCE) system is highly appreciable. We need to know the repercussions in being judgmental about the child based on summative test performance , as the child may be/may not be physically/mentally fit on the given day to take the test which automatically reflects on child’s performance.
Hence, under no circumstances exam should be the yard stick to assess the child.
Education is incomplete without training the child to be an independent being who will be able to think critically and solve problems with his logical thinking and reasoning ability.
All these 21st Century skill will be developed among the students only when the curriculum focuses on all round development rather than the academic excellence.
Education should focus on the three domains of child: cognitive, affective and psycho motor.
Yet another major issue in this regard is the quality of teachers. Today’s teachers are not teachers of choice, they are teachers of compulsion which in turn reflects on their performance in the school. Most of them follow the “Bill & the Bell” policy.
They are not considering teaching Profession as a Noble one. One major point they forget is that they are dealing with human beings and not machines. An Engineer can fault, a software personnel may fault but if a teacher faults the consequence will be fatal. All the teachers should remember “who dares to teach must never cease to learn”.
–Agencies