School of Inertia

angry voices are raised over saffronisation of syllabi. even chief ministers find time to discuss it. maybe their argument has merits. but in all this noise, no one speaks for changing the outmoded school curriculum. sudeshna chatterjee and pallavi mittal find out the areas where we need a real change. africa is a dark continent, says our geography text book.it is overrun with equatorial rain forests and makes for a difficult place to inhabit. history lessons are replete with instances of pious kings who ruled justly. and chemistry teachers encourage students to memorise periodic tables. that was over a decade ago. it's end-2001 and we haven't changed much. the wine is old and so is the bottle. the lechlanche cell still exists in our school laboratories and science books, cloning and mysteries of genetics can wait. the journey from the ussr to commonwealth of independent states is glossed over as is the virtual death of communism. unimaginative and steeped in stereotypes, these books form the basis of education till secondary school, before reference books take over. the apex body engaged in crafting curriculum for schools, the national council for educational research and training, has undertaken the task of overhauling the syllabi for schools. but only after a lag of 13 years. the last time sweeping changes were made in the school syllabi was in 1988, two years after the national policy on education was introduced by the union government. in all this, one would think that the debate on saffronisation of school curriculum stands alone. ``instead of framing a new education policy and passing it using the right route, the government preferred a shortcut,'' said several state ministers at a convention organised by sahmat. the policy has to be approved by the central advisory board on education. this was not done. but why has it taken so long for world changes to make it to our school textbooks? part of the problem is due to the fact that the procedure of syllabus-making is steeped in bureaucratic tangles. it, therefore, becomes much easier to build on a basic text, the foundations of which may be decades old, rather than re-write entire texts. the knowledge lag is particularly glaring in science and mathematics. says suraj prakash, principal of crpf school: ``the outdated practicals, particularly in higher classes, is evaporating the scientific instinct in children. take for instance, the lechlanche cell. it is archaic. the modern battery cell should be incorporated in the syllabus instead.'' he also points out the uselessness of calculating resistance of a wire and focal lengths of concave and convex lenses. ``they just don't make sense,'' he says and suggests including experiments like testing of water quality and the percentage of chloride in it. nidhi mehra, maths teacher at birla vidya niketan, says the maths syllabus, in particular, lacks in linkages. the problem is not so much of outdated concepts as being out of sync with reality. she believes subjects like trigonometry and mindless memorising of proofs of theorems will not produce mathematical geniuses. ``the maths children learn in schools does not prepare them in nature. it's easy to calculate the area of a room with given dimensions but can a child calculate the area of a sofa in the living room? no,'' mehra says. but it's not just maths and science. abha mittal, a history teacher in birla vidya niketan says class x students are taught about african imperialism, russian revolution, freedom struggles in other countries, world after the second world war, as well as the indian freedom movement. ``contemporary topics like breaking up of russia or romania and the unification of germany have only a passing reference,'' she says. gyan bharti principal and history expert r c shekhar ^ associated with one of the legs of curriculum revision for classes xi and xii ^ says children are bombarded with too many unnecessary details of dates and achievements. ``the trouble is, those who prepare curriculum content are too detached and removed from children,'' says shashi mendiratta of centre for education management and development ^ an ngo which works with teachers and students in trying to evolve a more responsive curriculum. mendiratta especially has a problem with the way english language and grammar is taught. ``the child is bombarded with clauses and syntax and the mechanism of the language but at the end of it all still fails to write a sentence correctly. the curriculum has failed to recognise that interest in lexicon and language structure follows familiarity with day-to-day conversational and writing skills,'' she says. not everyone, however, believes incorporation of commercial english in the syllabus is a happy experience. says springdales school, dhaula kuan, principal jyoti bose: ``it has affected the ethos of the subject. it is important to know how to write a letter to the mcd complaining about an overflowing drain in your area, but does it have to be part of the english course?'' but there is some good news. ``there has been a gradual recognition that the boundaries of subjects like geography and social sciences are expanding and elements like environment sciences have been included.'' but teachers complain most about textbooks not being able to keep pace with other sources of knowledge. ``internet and television have changed the way children receive knowledge. textbooks, perhaps, can't match that pace. but somewhere there has to be a link, a continuity between what children learn from technology and what they read in textbooks,'' says bose. sveta dave chakravarty of the cemd says piecemeal additions are made to the course without looking at the whole picture. a long-term systemic solution is the only answer. ``all the stakeholders ^ students, teachers and the syllabus makers ^ have to get together and discuss what the children really want. it's certainly not information. what they need are the skills to put information to use,'' she says.