The history of modern education of
India dated back to 1835, with Lord Macaulay being the golden calf. His idea was to form a class of Indians who
may be interpreters between British and the millions whom they ruled. He wanted
a class of persons, Indian in blood and colour, but English in taste, in
opinions, in morals, and in intellect. In reality, he wanted to create an array
of Indians who could be perpetual servants to them or clerks at the best. The
examination reforms in India dated back to 1882 with Hunter Commission reporting
on problems of secondary education and Sadler Commission reviewed the entire
field from school education to university education.
Further, Hartog Commission of 1929
“devoted far more attention to mass education than Secondary and University
Education. This commission in its report said that “out of every 100 pupils (boys
and girls) who were in Class I in 1922-23, only 18 were reading in class IV in
1925-26. This resulted in a relapse into illiteracy. In 1937, Gandhi ji came up
with the famous Wardha Scheme of Education, which tragically never fully came
into existence. This scheme calls for free and compulsory education for age 6
to 14. The biggest irony of Indian Education lies in the fact that it took us
71 years to implement Right to Education Act in 2009 which made the elementary
education compulsory for children of 6 to 14 years of age. The National Policy
on Education of 1968 called for education spending to increase to six
percentage of the national income which never saw the light of the day. The
highest expenditure on Education in India remained at 4.57% till date. For the
year 2016-17 it was just 3.65% of the GDP. In the last two decades NCERT came
up with National Curriculum Framework (NCF). The NCF 2005 documents draw its
policy basis from earlier government reports on education as Learning without burden.
Adhering by the spirit of NCF and
Position Papers of providing burden free education, Central Board of Secondary
Education introduced Continuous and Comprehensive Evaluation (CCE) in 2009. CCE
gave equal importance to Formative and Summative Assessment of a child. It gave
value to holistic growth of a child. In 2011, CBSE made the Class tenth exams
optional. CBSE is one of the premier education boards of India. More than 16
lakh students appeared in Class tenth examination and close to 11 lakh students
appeared in Class twelfth examinations in the last session. CBSE is considered
liberal and modern in its approach towards imparting education as compared to
the other state boards of the country. Of late, CBSE became the buzz of news
items when it announced the change in its class tenth examination pattern.
Earlier, the question papers were sent to schools which remained responsible
for conduct and checking of the examination papers. Due benefit was given to
the child for his or her co-scholastic performance. New methods of
teaching-learning were incorporated and stress was given on learning by doing.
ICT became the integral part of teaching. Students prepared projects using ICT
and it opened an immense platform for them to learn. CBSE invested huge amount
of money in training of the teachers and opened new Centre of Excellences
across India.
A teacher teaching in a CBSE school has
to mandatorily undergo four capacity building training programmes in a year. They are beneficial in order to learn the new
tools of assessment and various new pedagogical techniques. Rajasthan Model
Schools which were a part of Rajasthan Board earlier decided to switch to CBSE
board in 2015-16 citing the advantages of CCE. Delhi government has also
introduced the CCE guidelines in its school incurring a lot of cost. Massive
training programmes were conducted across the states by CBSE in order to train
the teachers and make them compatible with the CCE guidelines. The introduction
of CCE was full of hiccups; its implementation at pan India level took a couple
of years and as things were about to get settled CBSE came up with a notification
early this year restoring Class tenth Board examination w. e. f. the Academic
Year 2017-18. The notification came more like a ‘fatwa’ issued by CBSE
nullifying the efforts made during the last ten years. The entire energy and
money invested since 2009 came to a standstill with a stroke of a pen.
The roots of this problem lie in the
year 2000. The Birla-Ambani committee to study the reforms in Education came
with the policy framework laying stress on making the students a skilled
workforce, rather than thinking-questioning rational. This committee further
undermines the importance of subjects like philosophy, history, culture and
literature. For them language needs to be taught merely as a skill and just
enable the learners to write business letters. Secondly the framework document
laid stress on the technology rather than Science per say. The Research and
Development will be based on the expectations of the industry rather than the
requirements of the subject or the needs of the knowledge hungry students. It is more like returning to the 1835
principle of Macaulay where we are producing more of glorified clerks today
rather than research oriented pupils.
According to the 2016 report by the
Montreal-based UNESCO Institute for Statistics and Global Education Monitoring
- India has 47 million youth of secondary and higher secondary school-going age
dropping out of school. The enrolment in class 10 is 77 percent, but enrolment
in class 11 is only 52 per cent, according to a report from the New Delhi-based
Institute for Policy Research Studies (PRS). Six million children aged 6-13 are
estimated to be still out of the school system, according to a 2014 survey by
the Ministry of HRD. This shows that we have moved very little since Hartog
Commission’s report of 1929.
The abolition of Class tenth School
based examination on the pretext of improving quality of education is just a
mirage to cover the shortcomings of our education system. With an increase in
number of students failing in class tenth, what kind of progress our education
system will be making is beyond thought. Suicide rate in school children is
alarmingly high. In the year 2014 alone, more than two thousand students
committed suicide because of failure in examination. Failing a 15 year old will
neither serve any purpose nor improve the quality of education. Abolition of
CCE and school based exam system will de-motivate the students as well as teachers.
Students will resort to the age old practice of cramming and teachers will now
focus more on syllabus completion rather than learning. This wrong step will
flourish the markets with guides, examination keys and kunjis.
It’s been more than 180 years since
Macaulay came to India and wrote the destiny of millions of young Indians then.
We are still struggling to find the right education policy for our children.
This sudden change in exam policy by CBSE is under criticism as a class tenth
mark-sheet is more of an age proof rather than the success card of a child’s
future. Every child is special and no one under 15 years of age deserves to be
failed just on the parameters of some bogus examination system. It is like
evaluating a fish, a monkey, a lion and a cat on the ability to climb a tree
where a fish is destined to fail. We should strive to take our education system
forward rather than going back to the Stone Age.
- Jagdeep
Singh More
Educationalist
