The Statesman (21 July 2018)
Mainstreaming
Health and Physical Education
The
Central Board of Secondary Education (CBSE) has taken a path-breaking decision
for millions of school children by making it mandatory for schools to allocate at
least one period daily for Health and Physical Education (HPE) from the current
session. The guidelines issued henceforth show the collaboration of HRD
Ministry with Sports ministry aiming at producing medal winning sportspersons
in the future. It is a welcome step for school students as it will provide them
a platform to nurture their talent.
The
HPE manual issued by the Board integrates games, yoga, physical exercises, life-skills
and value education for holistic development of a child. The HPE component is
divided into four strands namely Games/Sports, Health & Fitness, Social
Empowerment through Work Education and Action (SEWA) and Health & Activity
card records. Each strand is allocated fixed periods and marks. The guidelines
further states that there will be no theory classes as a part of this format.
Every child is free to choose the games of his/her choice under this system. The manual designates the class teacher
responsible for ensuring that each child participates in all strands and will
facilitate all of them in the absence of sports teacher. It is mandatory for
the schools to implement HPE and upload a report of work accomplished across
the strands of secondary and senior secondary grades for enabling students to
sit for the Board examination. This obligatory clause has come as a nightmare
for the schools.
The
HPE circular issued by the Board came less like guidelines but more like a fatwa.
It seems the manual has been borrowed from some foreign agency like the
infamous failed Continuous and Comprehensive Evaluation (CCE) system of the
board. The board has not even taken the infrastructure hurdles of schools into
consideration but pronounced a mammoth task to be undertaken. There are numerous schools across India
affiliated in the seventies and eighties which have either moderate size playgrounds
or no playgrounds at all. Considering a school having four sections each of
forty students from class ninth to twelfth, the allocation of time table is a
daunting task. To accommodate over hundred students in a playground at a time
and insuring their safety is in itself challenging. The HPE format gives
students the liberty to choose the game/sport of their own choice. It is beyond
comprehension how a teacher will manage a class of over four dozen students
choosing different games in one period. The board executives have not even
bothered to look at these issues before issuing the injunction.
The
onus of responsibility lies on the class teacher is itself making the mockery
of the orders. At secondary and senior secondary levels, a class teacher is a
specialist of her/his subject and not a physical education teacher. An economics
or physics teacher in her late fifties guiding young pupils the intricacies of
playing basket ball is enough to imagine the ridicule nature of the format. Policy makers are of the opinion that it is
desirable that every teacher should know the basics of the games. It is same
like an English language teacher teaching mathematics when the later subject teacher
is absent in the pretext that every teacher should know basic maths.
The
component SEWA which is Social Empowerment through Work Education and Action is
again proving an embarrassment for the schools. Of late, the schools have
become too cautious to take students out for excursions and other community
services due to frequent occurrences of untoward incidences during the past one
year. On one hand the government has failed to formulate a sound education
policy and has failed miserably to enact even a single law for the welfare of
teachers while on the other hand it wants them to perform magical spells to
change the education system of the country overnight. SEWA also involves
maintenance of huge records, which will hamper the already overburdened
schedule of the students.
In
our country, board examinations and results are too competitive and stressful
for a child that it gives little scope for other leisure within the prevalent
education framework. The policy of mainstreaming HPE is good in intension but
is hard to implement. The fear is it should not meet its fate like CCE where
the records were bogusly kept by the schools without delivering its effective
end-product. Majority of the schools in
our country are primarily academic oriented and sports facilities merely
complement the scholastics. The call of the hour is to provide an impetus to our
sports budget and the education system needs an overhauling where more and more
sports schools should be setup and sports should be treated at-par with the
scholastic subjects by ensuring lifelong livelihood commitment to the
sportspersons. Government should understand the fact that if we are so serious
about increasing our Olympics medal tally, we should improve on providing the
sports infrastructure to our kids on the lines of China rather than giving them
one extra free period.
-
Jagdeep S. More, Educationist
