Schoolgoing children are often burdened with a heavy curriculum, which gets in the way of their personal lives and leaves them with little time for sports and hobbies that are equally important for their holistic development.
While students and parents have been stressed about this, the National Council of Educational Research and Training (NCERT) is taking steps to address the complaints.
Prakash Javadekar, the Human Resource Development (HRD) Minister of India recently made an announcement that promises to make schoolgoing children (and their parents) very happy.
Here are six things to know about it:
1. Beginning from the academic year 2019-2020, the content of the NCERT curriculum will be cut down by 10-15%. This is the first step towards reducing the overall curriculum by 50%, according to the HRD Minister.
2. Speaking at a meeting of the NCERT general council, Javadekar said, “[The CBSE] curriculum will be reviewed to ensure holistic education in which there will be time for physical education, value education, life-skills education and experiential learning. [It] needs to be reduced. We have decided to reduce [the] curriculum by 50 %. This year, there will be 10-15 % reduction. Next year it will be more. Finally, in 2021, the target will be achieved.”
3. Speaking to The Print, an official from NCERT said, “Social sciences will have more cuts than science, mathematics and languages… Science, mathematics and the languages do not need much reduction, just some pruning of content here and there. The science syllabus for higher classes like Class XI and XII especially does not need any reduction because that is a level at which students need more study material.”
4. As a part of this project, all the duplicate and redundant portions will be edited out, leaving the students with concise, crisp textbooks. The ministry promises that this reduction will be scientific.
5. Another means by which the HRD Ministry is taking a progressive step forward is by grading states on their performance indicators in education, based on 70 parameters.
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“All the states will be assessed on performance indicators based on 70 parameters. This will improve the quality of education and give a fair picture of where each state stands. There will be a healthy competition to improve the performance,” Javadekar said.
6. The minister further claimed that more NCERT books will be published this year as compared to the last two years. “Two crore books were published two years ago, last year six crore books were published, and this year, we aim to produce eight crore or more books,” he said.
(Edited by Gayatri Mishra)
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