Why return of Class 10 board exams is collective failure of the system

Human ability for resistance to change is impeccable and the return of the Class 10 board exams is the best example.

A habit is a habit. It doesn’t matter if it is bad; if it’s in our routine to torment ourselves then that’s how it has to be. We love systems and lines and disorderly order. Our education system has trained us to fall in line, and going by the current situation in the country, we have indeed learnt well.

So, no matter how good the policies of the liberal educationist be, they will be offered resistance and not be implemented. And we will fall back to learning through evaluation via examinations, and enroll in schools to be disciplined. Can you imagine what a three-year-old must be subjected to each day when his mind wanders to fathom the new daily experiences, and the table is slammed to bring him to attention?

Well, no, it doesn’t matter, we don’t want kids to discover, we want them to learn. Even if what we want them to learn might not be the best. New-age moms hire drivers and put their cars on service to ensure "baba", after school, goes from one learning class to another — football, kids cookery, dancing, robotics and whatnot.

Their alibi: if he stays at home he will watch TV, so must keep them occupied to keep their minds from wandering. Can somebody tell them that life is all about self-discovery.

Gandhi’s training in law got him thrown out of a carriage, but his later years of self-discovery made him the Mahatma who showed the world how to fight injustice with peaceful means.

The return of the Class 10 boards is the collective failure of the system. It is the failure of resistance from parents and teachers, and the inability to show value in the bold step which was taken after many incidents of suicide among overburdened children.

Who will now take the responsibility if with the board exams, the suicides come back as well? What measures have been put into place to ensure that kids would not be under pressure this time?

Can we revisit the reasons why the board exams were scrapped in the first place and weigh them against the reasons to bring them back? Can we then put remedies against each problem? Why have the exams been made compulsory?

If I know my child can’t take the pressure, why can’t I be given the option to opt out of a marks race, but go through grading instead? Why do we always fall back on one size fit all?

When rules are changed, it’s not just one political party that pushes for it. As one nation, whether you opposed it or not, all political parties were a party to the changes and they need to stand by them and work towards making it a success.

How many years did we give to this scheme? What measures did we put in, to make it a success? Why did we fail? Have we undertaken a whole M&E process?

We didn’t have more suicides in Class 12 exams. Children suddenly didn’t start failing entrance tests. Then, where is the need to bring the Class 10 board exams back?

Some might point to the failure of the Continuous and Comprehensive Evaluation (CCE) and there is merit in criticising it. Not the idea but its implementation. For the longest period of time, schools had no clue how it was to be implemented. I remember I was still working with UNESCO, when a school principals union approached us to help them develop CCE methods.

However, later CBSE came up with the guidelines. But to unlearn is a difficult task. Teachers and schools were happy with exams, as it was easy to mark and assess. For parents too, it was simpler and comparable.

CCE in its true value is difficult to measure. More so, if your class is crowded. So, though students were moved to projects and more practical assignments, the old habit of exams and unit tests could not be done away with.

So, in addition to the assignments, the unit tests and term-end exams continued, which just added to the burden of the child.

The essence of CCE was to do away with any kind of exams and to have an overall evaluation of the child in a continuous manner, and not through projects followed by tests followed by weekly exams weekly and so on. The systems failed to completely adopt the new methods.

We have to understand, however, that exams are a shortcut to save trouble from undertaking lengthy analysis and being challenged thereafter. The teachers weren’t trained in analysing a child’s learning. They were only trained in teaching a subject and then marking papers.

Without training them in analysing children, which may also require socio-psycho analysis, how could the teachers be asked to undertake CCE? CCE could, therefore, never be implemented in its true essence unless each and every teacher was trained in the methods.

Every now and then, we read about surveys from Pondicherry to Ladakh that show the "learning deficiency" of children. More than evaluating the learning of a child in a school, we need to survey if the child likes to come to school. Does he get enough time to learn by discovery, does he really learn anything in school, given an option would he rather not come to school and instead meet his school friends somewhere else? I am sure if such a survey was undertaken, the results would be interesting.

On the pretext of making a child learn and making examination compulsory, we are perhaps setting in stress and disappointment meaninglessness, early in our children. We need instead to make learning fun, children wanting to come to school, them wanting to learn and discover.

As the new education policy comes into place, we need to undertake some radical thinking, we as policy-makers need to unlearn.

We put too much pressure on a school and expect far too much than they can deliver. In the six hours that a child is in school, we expect them to learn three languages, mathematics, science, history, geography, dance, music, theatre, sports, patriotism, sensitisation on minorities, gender, social habits, leadership skills, communications and so on and so forth. Just about everything is supposed to be taught in those six hours at school and accomplished in ten years.

The family and the community has no responsibility. It’s time we say that three hours at school will be spent at discovering a subject and the rest in learning activities to discover themselves through the arts and sports.

Social skills, leadership skills, communications, sensitisation, patriotism and subject learning too should be made the responsibility of the parent community. Not that it won’t be imbibed at school. People can’t just have a child, put them in school and say the work is done.

The school, on the other hand, has to ensure that they use the methods of discovery, self-discovery and undertake continuous evaluation of a child’s learning without exams. We need to retain policies of no-detention till Class 8, and, infact, it should have been taken further as planned to Class 10.

However, we are shouted down by people who show surveys of learning deficiency in students. Learning deficiency is not because you have a "no-detention" policy. Learning deficiency is because the school and the parents together, could not teach "a" child. And here we have to make a difference between parents who are educated enough to teach and those who aren’t. Because where parents are not educated enough to teach then the entire onus is on the schools. If a child’s learning is deficient in a particular class then the entire community needs to ensure support to bring the levels up.

The Right to Education is not just a right, it is also a responsibility that we as the government, as the community and as a nation have to guarantee to our future generation. With learning which is free from stress and failure and learning through discovery the only compulsory component in child education.

Also read: Why board exam results no longer decide your future