Any young person embarking on a career, will be stumped by the plethora of choices available at the school level too.  Each and every State has its own board of Education, and its own pattern of Education, though the 10 plus 2 is the standard format in which students take one public examination at the end of the Tenth Standard and another at the end of the plus 2 stage.  These two public examinations, with rare exceptions are not exercises in creativity and the rat race is to somehow produce 100% pass in every school.  Worse is the rat race to somehow score one hundred percent in each of the subjects of Physics, Chemistry, Mathematics and Biology, so that the boy gets an admission into the Engineering courses or takes up Medicine as a career.

Be that as it may, the wide range of choices at the Higher Education level also is baffling.  The States have their own Technological Universities, and under each of these Universities there are up to even six hundred Engineering colleges, like in AP and Telengana put together.  Tamil Nadu does not lag behind and is second in terms of the number of colleges.

The "social engineering" as many local politicians have preferred to call it, is fine, but does it really add up to high standards of education at the school level, which is so vital for the formative development of not only intelligence but also creativity in terms of making the child think for himself or herself, and discover his latent potential?

The answer, sadly, is a big NO.bench mark, 

So, if we have a huge problem in terms of the "System", how do we play around it, and try for some solutions?

The answer is the Central Government controlled Central Board of Secondary Education (CBSE).

Volumes have been written on reams of print, about the relatively better quality of education that obtains in each of these schools across the country.  It is highly organized, and the syllabus has some element of "thinking ability", and as a consequence, some element of creativity.

It is a great matter of pride that the students from the CBSE pattern of education are more articulate, more easily sociable, have greater awareness of the realities around them, and have the pep in them to excel, at least to some extent.

At the other end of the spectrum, the State Board students, almost as a rule, are products of a great deal of cramming, and this no good to their scholarly attributes or their thinking capabilities.

There is a huge evidence here.  Being part of the "System" and managing it to perfection, are a dozen odd schools in a place called Rasipuram, which is a small town, around one hour's drive from Salem, which is a big city in North Tamil Nadu.  Each of these schools pride themselves in producing one hundred percent passes, and the number of "one hundred" out of "one hundred" in each of the key subjects keeps increasing, year after year.

The result?  Parents from even Andhra Pradesh and Kerala, and of course, the neighboring Karnataka, admit their children in such schools, as Hindi is a subject that can be taken as a main language.  Added to it is the general perception that the quality of State Board Education in Tamil Nadu is slightly better than in the other South Indian States.  The plus two education has become a huge business here, reportedly having a turnover of over fifity crores per annum!!

Each and every student gets to pay even one lakh and fifty thousand as the donation, but the parents do not bother. 

Well, the twist in the tale is elsewhere.  The students who score such high marks fail in the first two years of their education at the prestigious Anna University main campus, in Chennai!!!  Worse, such children have extremely poor standards of spoken English, and the likes of Infosys Technologies reject them without a second thought.

So, where do the CBSE students stand out?  They take the IIT examination, and land up either with the IITs or at least with the NITs.  If one takes a statistics of the number of State Board students who make it to these institutions, the real picture will come out.

One need not overnight urge the State Boards to switch over to the CBSE pattern or allied pattern, or adopt the CBSE syllabus right away.  Certain modifications may need to be done, to reflect the cultural factors that pertain to a particular region.  It is impossible to switch to something new within a very short time.

However, a very honest attempt should be made.  It is here that an urgent need is there, for the Central Government to intervene, take the whole lot of State boards into consideration, hear all their views and then gradually convince them to move over to something more creative.  There is an urgent need to make every single question paper creative and innovative in both the depth and the methodology, so that the student can think.

Mere rote learning will be a sure recipe for disaster, and this is exactly why the IT majors are very much worried about how the present System of education prepares the student in no meaningful way, to take on challenges of a new world of opportunities and talent.

What we have is a huge deficit in terms of human resources.  At least in the short run, the CBSE standard can be a benchmark.  Once this achieved, in say, six years time, it is quite possible to upgrade the CBSE syllabus itself.  After a few years,there will be new bench mark.  This is exactly how we should proceed with the task of making the students industry ready, not only in the near future, but for all times to come. 

• Written by ABSIVAKUMAR.
• In category Careers.
• 9 years ago.

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