SPARE OUR YOUNG GENERATION

For students who have just moved to Class X, this is a crucial year following CBSE’s announcement that they will not be required to write the Board exams, which have for years defined the academic and career paths of Indian students.

CBSE has made the Board exams optional. A student has the choice of deciding if or not to write the exam. They will otherwise be graded. They will be assessed on all-round performance through the Continuous and Comprehensive Evaluation, or CCE, which focuses on creative and soft skills apart from pure academics.

More than 80% of the parents, I am sure are not in favour of the optional exams. They want their children to choose the option of writing the papers and would like to know his/her grade after exams to be on the safest side.They mean less stress for the child at a later stage. They want their children to clear the CBSE exam, which in itself is a milestone with full confidence to measure his/her own capabilities to decide his/her future with no external pressure. Exams would make students accountable towards their studies, and will help them judge for their weaknesses. The students’ responses too I am sure are in favour of the exams. An examination would let them know where they stand as the results mark the start of one’s academic career.
Allowing the school to grade their students themselves, there is more possibility of malpractices and cooking up the data. Now that the education has become a big business in most of the cities, the basic values of education are forgotten. Schools with good results take exorbitant fees and it is sure that they will go to any extent to show that their results are good .We can’t expect an impartial grading of students with the new system.
First of all CBSE I to X and till XII syllabus has been implemented to study in a proper way and to understand the concepts of subjects especially science and maths in a deeper way. Ask any other person who is not from CBSE to explain Trigonometry relations and formulae, they find it difficult. But a CBSE X pass student can do it easily. He/She has learnt all these things by practicing the things on paper. If a CBSE X passed student knows the digestive system of human being, if he knows greenhouse effect, if he knows global warming, then it should be understood that it has made him or had been taught him by explaining in a proper way and finally important is that he has been made to write down the figures, chemical reactions, etc. And a conscious mind resembles many things with the help of figures/pictures. When one says trigonometric relations, a figure will come in front of his eyes which was printed in NCERT book which he has studied years back. It is a kind request to Indian Human Resource Department to implement the same theoretical pattern examinations. Please don't spoil the future of the Bright Indian students. We know some pressure will be there on child's mind, but if he gets through this period, then he will be the most confident person and he will be proud that he has gone through the CBSE X examinations, that too in a theoretical pattern ,not even grading. And one more thing, this grade system is also supported by the paper evaluators (teachers)
Ideally, interest in the material to be learned is the best stimulus to learning, rather than such external goals as grades or later competitive advantage. Not teaching devices, but teachers, are the principle agents of instruction and more importantly, learning. The first object of any act of learning, over and beyond the pleasure it may give, is that it should serve us in the future. Learning should not only take us somewhere; it should allow us later to go further more easily. Mastery of the fundamental ideas of a field involves not only the grasping of general principles, but also the development of a attitude towards leaning and inquiry, towards guessing and hunches, towards the possibility of solving problems on one's own. Unless detail is placed into a structured pattern, it is rapidly forgotten. At each stage of development a person has a characteristic way of viewing the world and explaining it to himself. The task of teaching a subject to a person at any particular developmental stage is one of representing the structure of that subject in terms of the person's way of viewing things. Learning a subject seems to involve three almost simultaneous processes. First, there is acquisition of new information -- often information that runs counter to or is a replacement for what the person has previously known. A second aspect of learning may be called transformation -- the process of manipulating knowledge to make it fit new tasks. Transformation comprises the ways we deal with information in order to go beyond it. A third aspect of learning is evaluation, checking whether the way we have manipulated information is adequate to the task.
The quest, it seems to many, is to devise materials that will challenge the superior student while not destroying the confidence and the will-to-learn of those who are less fortunate. We have no illusions about the difficulty of such a course, yet it is the only one open to us if we are to pursue excellence and at the same time honor the diversity of talents we must educate. Somewhere between apathy and wild excitement, there is an optimum level of aroused attention that is ideal for classroom activity. Films, audio-visual aids and other such devices may have the short-run effect of catching attention. In the long run, they may produce a passive person waiting for some sort of curtain to go up to arouse him. The issue is particularly relevant in an entertainment oriented, mass-communication culture where passivity and spectatorship are dangers.
If teaching is done well and what we teach is worth learning, there are forces at work that will provide the external prod that will get people more involved in the process of learning than they were in the past. There is much discussion about how to give our schools a more serious intellectual tone, about the relative emphasis on athletics, popularity, and social life on the one hand and on scholarly application on the other. The teacher's tasks as communicator, model and identification figure can be supported by a wise use of a variety of devices that expand experience, clarify it, and give it personal significance.
Our education system does not encourage teamwork. A classic example would be examinations and tests, if we work together in an exam we will fail. They call it cheating in the name of testing our knowledge. Our rulers(I mean ministers) realized that unimaginable things can be created when a group of people put their minds together for something. That is why they want us to be separated and alone, by brainwashing us into believing that to succeed in life we have to be competitive, be alone and abandoned by family. The fact is, when we succeed in life, more people would gather around us and our family’s status does not change.
At school, we get scolded and punished for making mistakes. Our intelligence is also judged based on whatever mistakes we made at school. Then we are told not to make mistakes again in the future. But how is that possible? We are humans, we are bound to make mistakes as we learn new things! This only brings out the inaction within us that paralyzes our natural desire to take action when opportunities arise. Our educators tell us to learn from our mistakes as we grow.
Rulers know deep in their hearts that money can be used to buy power (that is what they are doing around the world). So to keep us from becoming money literate and attaining power, courses like money engineering do not exist. Instead, they instill in us ambitions like doctor, engineer and lawyer. This makes us “modern slaves” of our rulers until the day we die! Look at how much we are taxed, both through tax and inflation. Here is the solid proof of the intervention of our rulers with our education for the worse. The never ending change of language used to teach Mathematics and Science in our country, which is an act of corruption on our education system.
Unfortunately, we must admit that this is one of the ugliest facts that we have to swallow regardless of the places we live in, we are all still “slaves” of our “king”. Probably, and the first step to curb the problem would be the realization of this corrupted education system of ours. Next? We must join power and be the “troublesome” citizens. But we would not rebel, we will play according to the rules of the government and win the game they play!