The report on the Samacheer Kalvi syllabus submitted at the Madras High Court on Tuesday is largely the voice of the Matriculation school lobby and tends to adopt a condescending perspective of students going to government schools, according to the State Platform for Common School System.
The report, prepared by a panel of experts appointed by the State government following a Supreme Court directive, is a nearly 600-page document. An annexure of a few hundred pages was also submitted.
Pointing to a “contradiction,” P.B. Prince Gajendra Babu, general secretary, State Platform for Common School System, observes that the report, which at some places states that the Samacheer Kalvi syllabus is of low standard, at another place points to an abrupt upward jump for government school students. He says: “There is no evidence of government school students or teachers saying that they find the syllabus tough. Only the committee is saying it.” Also, the report says that many of the terms used may not make any sense to the students in rural areas unless the teacher explains. “This is clearly offensive and condescending to students in rural areas. Just because many of them study in Tamil medium, they do not become incapable of learning what their counterparts in urban English medium schools learn,” Mr. Babu adds.
Senior educationist S.S. Rajagopalan, who has served as teacher and head of schools run by the government as well as private managements, says the panel's report is prejudiced. “Even the constitution of the committee was one-sided. There was not a single member representing government or aided schools that 85 per cent of our children go to.”
‘Absurd'
Deeming the report's comment on the potential of children in rural areas “absurd,” he says: “None of the members has significant experience of teaching students in rural areas. On what basis can they judge whether a child going to a rural school can learn a particular concept or not? It is anyway the teacher's job to ensure students learn.”
Educationist S. Madasamy, professor of Tamil, who was involved in the process of evolving Samacheer Kalvi textbooks, notes that adopting an urban view of the “rural student,” as the report has, is a sign of prejudice. “We made a genuine attempt to do away with archaic usages and use a more conversational, student-friendly language in textbooks. I don't mean to say everything about it is perfect, but it was certainly a beginning in the direction of progressive, student-friendly curriculum,” he says.
According to the annexure of the panel's report, most of the members on the experts' panel have observed that the textbooks shall be compared to the standard of the textbooks used in the Central Board of Secondary Education (CBSE). The standards of National Council of Educational Research and Training (NCERT) textbooks and the recommendations of the NCF were also to be considered.
The contents of the report include excerpts of the NCF 2005, issues raised in position papers on curriculum, syllabus and textbooks brought out by the National Focus Groups of the NCERT, syllabus review (level of content, deviation from NCF, abstract concepts, omission of life skills), instances of factual errors, improper language usages and transliteration. A chapter of the report (chapter VIII) has been dedicated to the ‘Comparison between Samacheer textbooks and Matriculation textbooks.'
The annexure also has copies of letters sent by several associations of matriculation schools to the government, making an appeal against implementation of Samacheer Kalvi in its present form.
The report also highlights the need to make evaluation more meaningful.
Experts, however, say that the issue of evaluation is a larger concern which is independent of the Samacheer Kalvi debate.
