The Plus Two Pain
Is it going to be plus 2 plus 3, or 10 plus 2 plus 2, or even 1 1 plus 3? In this new game of numbers called the restructuring of education, what is in danger of being forgotten is the crux of the problem. What is important is not how many years a child spends at school and college in one or two or three stages, but what and how he learns during that time. Everyone seems to agree that the education system needs to be overhauled. Unfortunately, the great debate in the restructuring of education seems to be centring around irrelevancies like whether a child should spend 10, 11 or 12 years at school, whether this should be in one or two stages and finally whether at college the average student should spend two or three years getting his bachelor's degree. Few seem to be worried about modernising curricula or introducing a new approach to education, an approach in which the teacher should learn to draw out the student instead of pumping him with information. Discussions on curricula also tend to centre around the width and breadth of the subject to be ‘ covered’ instead of worrying about how a subject is to be taught. In the last few weeks, thousands of children all over the country have appeared for the first time for the Class X examination which was introduced under the new pattern of education by the previous government.