Who are failing our children?
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Kerala's cabinet has decided to end the All Pass policy at the high school level to improve the quality of public education in the state. A minimum of 30 per cent marks in the written test in all subjects along with the marks in the Continuous Evaluation (CE) is mandatory for a child studying in class eight to qualify for class nine from this academic year onwards. The Education Minister has made it clear that there will be a comprehensive overhaul of the CE system. With this, after long debates and controversies, the CE and fail-safe grading system implemented by Kerala since 2005 and included in the Central Education Policy of 2009, is undergoing fundamental corrections. The new school curriculum prepared by the Central government has assessed that promoting the students to higher classes without checking their cognitive level affects the learning standard and it has been decided that the students would be promoted to the next class only according to the marks obtained in the fifth and eighth class exams.
As part of that, the Modi government has amended the Right to Education Act, 2009 in 2019. While 19 states were in favour of the Central policy, Kerala was on the side of Continuous Evaluation and a fail-safe grading system to improve student performance. Finally, Kerala is also yielding to the national approach, ignoring the criticisms of the left-wing teachers' organizations and the left-wing cultural groups including the Kerala Sasthra Sahithya Parishad. It is undeniable that the quality of our public school education is very weak. Not only educationalists, but at one point even the Director of General Education came forward against the practice of promoting everyone. There are studies which find that students who study the state syllabus lag behind in competitive exams.
According to NCERT's 2022 NIPUN Mission ('National Initiative for Proficiency in Reading with Understanding and Numeracy) Survey Report, more than half of the third-standard students in Kerala cannot read or understand Malayalam properly, and according to the ASER (Annual Status of Education Report) survey conducted by the NGO Pratham, 35.3 per cent of the fifth-grade students and 16.3 per cent of the eighth-graders cannot read and comprehend even the second-grade book correctly. These findings also make it necessary to scrutinise the deterioration of our educational standards. Teachers and parents alike point out that students have no special motivation or pressure to learn and engage in the learning process, and the perception that they will succeed regardless of whether they learn or not has a negative impact on children's attitudes toward learning. A clear resonance of this is evidenced by the dropout of children from public schools and the increase in admissions to private schools this academic year.
However, it is delusional to think that the decline in the standard of school-level education will be remedied by just introducing minimum marks in the examination system. The focus of education should be on the student. It is essential to ensure that every child learns and excels. Education becomes meaningful when they are able to acquire literacy, numeracy and scientific thinking from textbooks. By acquiring correct beliefs about social distinctions, ability to face competitive exams, willingness to win and lose, perseverance, etc., they are able to strengthen themselves to face the adversities of life. It is foolish to try to hide behind little ploys like reintroducing the alphabet, changing the format of exams, and making minimum marks mandatory after failing to impart the value and humanity of education to the next generation. The first step to ensuring that the child is entitled to quality education is to recognize as soon as possible the depth of the educational deficit we are facing. Curriculum studies and research conducted after Covid-19 are in front of us which have shed light on the ways to do it.