The Central Board of Secondary Education (CBSE) on Friday asked all its affiliated schools to make arrangements for children to watch Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s address on Teachers’ Day. Schools have been told to inform the board by Monday evening about the arrangements being made .
‘A disturbing directive’Some schools described the CBSE circular as “disturbing” and said the directive “implies it is pretty much compulsory to keep students back in school till 5 p.m. to watch the Prime Minister’s speech.”
According to a form that each school has to fill and return, the CBSE expects students of all classes, including junior school right down to Class I, to be kept back in school for the programme.
In remote areas where TV, edusat or Internet facilities may not be available, arrangements have to be made for children to listen to the speech over radio. Also, schools have been asked to ensure uninterrupted power supply for the duration of the two-hour programme by arranging for generators/invertors as back-up.
Earlier this week, State Education Secretaries, who were called to the Capital by the Union Human Resource Development Ministry to discuss school education, were told to ensure that arrangements are made in all government and private schools for the live transmission of Mr. Modi’s interactive session with children at the Manekshaw Auditorium in Delhi.
Advertisements published in newspapers on Thursday inviting participation in Gurutsav — an essay writing competition in which students can write about their favourite teacher — have attracted charges of “creeping saffronisation” as there was no mention of Teachers’ Day in them though there was a photograph of Dr. Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan in whose memory the day is celebrated.
A gimmick: CongressDescribing Gurutsav as a gimmick and evidence of saffronisation by renaming Teachers’ Day, Congress spokesperson Shobha Oza said the BJP’s lack of respect for teachers was evident when the party stood by the Akhil Bharatiya Vidyarthi Parishad after its activists manhandled and allegedly caused the death of a professor, Harbhajan Singh Sabharwal, in Ujjain in 2006. “First ask their party workers to be more respectful to teachers,” she said.
