Do you sit and smile when election results are out, asked a tweet in response to the prime minister's Mann Ki Baat on education.
Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s advice to students that they should reduce their stress by celebrating examinations like festivals has not gone down well.
“Do not make these exams about pressure,” the prime minister said during his Mann Ki Baat radio show on Sunday. “Appear for them with a smile.” Exams, he claimed, “have nothing to do with life’s success or failure”.
The response to the prime minister’s statements started coming in almost as soon as the programme ended. Many pointed out that it was difficult to relax when board exam results determined admission to most colleges and so were crucial for the lives and careers of students. “College administrations want over 90% [minimum marks for admission],” said one social media user. “Yeh sab pleasure se thodi milega.” Surely, you can’t get such marks purely from pleasure.
Exam stress is near universal and Twitter users said it was wrong to play it down.
Disconnect between words, actions
Several listeners said Modi’s words did not match his government’s policy decisions that had made the year-end test the most important feature of school education, and added to the list of examinations students already face.
One of these decisions has been to restore the public Class 10 board exam, which will return in 2018 for all schools affiliated to the Central Board of Secondary Education. The board-based exam had been made optional in 2011, allowing students to instead sit for school-based exams.
In addition, the government is keen on scrapping the no-detention policy – whereby schools cannot fail any child till Class 8 – under the Right to Education Act, 2009. If this happens, even primary-level exams would become serious business as it would enable schools to make struggling children repeat a class. None of this helps battle exam stress.
Education activists pointed out that the government’s decision to restore the public board exam and its intention to amend the no-detention clause would render the policy of Continuous and Comprehensive Evaluation, introduced in 2009 under the education law, pointless. Under this policy, teachers record the progress of children – in scholastic and non-scholastic areas – over time, taking away the tyranny of the year-end exam.
“The Mann Ki Baat speech is all rhetoric,” said Rama Kant Rai of the National Coalition for Education, an umbrella group of organisations working on the right to education. “In the new system, examinations have been made everything. This, despite there being considerable research on stress caused by examinations.”
According to Rai, scrapping the no-detention clause will lead to more stress. “The CCE [Continuous and Comprehensive Evaluation] and no-detention policies made the system responsible, and doing away with them will put the pressure back on parents,” Rai explained. “The states have done nothing to ensure CCE worked – teachers were not recruited in sufficient numbers, they were not trained. Now it will once again be up to the parents to do whatever they can to make sure their children pass their exams.”
One Twitter user said, “[We] need more tolerance to failure, better accommodation for different learning levels, plus, exams should not be competitive.”
A dig at Modi
With the prime minister making education the subject of his Mann Ki Baat, the quips on his own qualifications were inevitable.
Modi’s bachelor’s and master’s degrees in political science, have been the subject of speculation by political rivals, especially the Aam Aadmi Party, which accused him of faking his educational credentials. The university, on its part, has resolutely refused to furnish documents in response to several right to information queries. Earlier this month, a commissioner in the Central Information Commission was transferred days after he ordered Delhi University to disclose the records of BA degrees in 1978 – the year in which Modi is said to have received his degree. The commissioner had also fined a university official for not complying with his order.
Courtesy: Scroll.in