CBSE Boards: India Just Pushed Education Decades Into The Past

CBSE has gone back to a redundant system of rote learning by introducing the boards again, writes Akshat Tyagi.

A week ago, the HRD Minister Prakash Javadekar announced that India will push its education system back by a decade. I have been waiting for more to be said about this drastic change, but the deafening silence has proven that our children are merely guinea pig for experiments and will never be a subject of our 'great intellectual discourse'. Even the vocabulary used to describe the change is bland and strictly informational.

Yes, India has announced that it will re-introduce CBSE Boards for standard 10th from the academic year 2017-18.

From the flawed evaluation design of CCE, we have sent our children back to the rusty annual standardised examination model. All that was done in the name of progressive reforms has been reversed.

Departure of CCE

The Comprehensive and Continuous Evaluation (CCE) that was introduced in 2009 with much fanfare will be killed from next year. This means that the republic doesn’t dare make the education of its children more humane; the boards are now here to stay, for many decades to come. The confidence to innovate and rethink has been defeated.

The more disturbing part is that the decision is being celebrated by children and educators alike. Ever since we became Macaulay’s children two hundred years ago, we have vanquished our ability to think about our own education. We have ceased to even think about the very purpose of learning anything.

Bringing back the boards will mean that the millions of students in the country will be judged based on how they reproduce their year-long learning on five standardised papers at the end of the year. If you cannot do this under stressful test conditions, you will be judged a failure. The focus of all private and public schools will immediately shift to drilling children as young as 14 with the exam format of CBSE; everything else will be rendered meaningless.

Holistic Learning is a Sham

The schooling experience of our children is about to deteriorate. The already exam-centred education of India will become even more oppressive. Need I mention what is already before our eyes for those who appear in standard 12th boards? The capacity to think deserts me.

The sham of ‘holistic’ learning has burst. When they introduced CCE, CBSE had claimed to understand how the current regime of year-end exams was torturous and led to lowered learning outcome. Are CBSE’s words now false? Our needs have in fact changed even more in these seven years. Should we not have moved forward to abolish the boards for 12th standard as well and replace it with a more organic assessment?

Lamentably, the decision is driven by feedback. The unspoken conclusion is that we have shied away from doing the tougher job of doing it right. Yes, certainly, the boards make for much less effort for both students and teachers. It is a shallow assessment of memory and speed, it allows an escape from the rigour of an authentic learning process.

Unilateral Approach

I am not saying that CCE was without flaws. It had become a tool in the hands of schools to unfairly award themselves 10 CGPAs, and the teachers had not aligned themselves to the very idea of an unconventional instrument of measurement. The students also managed to trick their unprepared teachers with copy-paste projects.

There are many problems in country, but does that entitle anybody to ask the queen to recolonise us? Then why are we colonising the minds of our generation?

The truth, whether we like it or not, was that CCE was always problematic for the objectives of Indian society. For the majority of Indian citizens, the purpose of education has become only economic mobility.

We don’t want children who value learning but only those who know how to earn a livelihood. The process of killing children’s imagination is deeply married to our national vision of development. As long as we continue thinking of education as a homogenising tool to feed the market demand (which is for engineers), we will continue to produce labourers.

While the world is busy arguing about the very merits of standardised tests (especially MCQs), we have happily embraced a culture in which topping a rigged exam system is prestigious.

If children did not learn under CCE, thought should have been given to the content. Is what we are teaching and how we are teaching it making sense? Is it helping and satiating our children? Asking these questions requires courage to abandon our sheer arrogance to think we know it all! It requires the humility to accept that we could be wrong.

Back to Rote Learning

Lastly, I never understood how hundreds and thousands of educators and children accept this rotten serving. A generation that doesn’t even accept a smartphone not of a brand of its choice keeps mum on an education system they hate. Why are our educators keeping shut, reducing their status to mere salespersons who are given targets at the beginning of the year?

Wasn’t this system meant for us? To let us thrive in happy, peaceful spaces? It’s time to challenge the hegemony of a stupid design, to reclaim it, and call out loud, “This emperor of education is N-A-K-E-D!”

(Akshat Tyagi is a 15-year-old entrepreneur and author from Delhi. His book‘Naked Emperor Of Education: A product review of the education system’ is the first Indian student voice against the dehumanising model of schooling. He headed India's No 1 Teen LifeZine in the past. He writes for several online publications and is engaged in independent research.)