Disclaimer: This is purely opinionated; you are equally entitled to your own point of view.
These past few months in quarantine has made me very anxious for my future, with schools on halt and cancelled examinations. So here's a little food for thought regarding our education.
I’m very sure many of us have seen countless arguments regarding school curriculums across the world. Many educators argue whether learning a foreign language is a necessity yet nobody argues that we should be learning life skills rather than pythagorean theorems.
While many schools boast about their “intellectually enhanced curriculum”, the only thing most of us probably seek in spending twelve years of our lives in school is to be able to learn things that will help us navigate through life. While math teachers say algebra is everywhere, I say not. What we really need to learn in math is, how to fill out taxes and navigate through investments because after twelve years of schooling and few more from college, what exactly will help us? We learn creative writing during English yet not one lesson teaches us how to fill our resumes. While we may learn how to differentiate fractions and decimals, we still have no idea what loans and mutual funds are.
This is where the problem lies. After these twelve years, I will probably be able to give a full lecture in Spanish about mixed fractions and rational numbers but I’d have no idea how to fill a tyre, cook a basic meal, get a voter ID or find ways to heal myself in a life threatening situation. So what exactly has school been teaching us all this time?
Recently, the Indian government proudly declared their decision to halve the CBSE syllabus. Alright, that is a fair decision because shorter exams and less stress. However at the end of the day, will this really matter when these children are grown adults thrown into the real world? Instead of just halving the syllabus, it truly would have been smarter to substitute the gap with lessons about life skills instead. Although my major concern is that while private schools have begun educating children about drug abuse, safety and sexual education however none of the government school children have any idea what puberty even is. They’d grow up their entire lives confused as they might mistake nicotine for an “ayurvedic” medicine if a pharmacist tells them so, they might never know why their bodies mature the way they do and who will be there to teach this to them? So many generations have grown up under this system that at this point, puberty is a “taboo” topic in most indian families. Does this sound like a fair education system to you?
Given the current circumstances, most children are sitting at home because our government issues curriculums aren’t digitally accesible, in which thousands of college and school going students are missing out. When the quarantine is lifted, curriculums will be altered to fit into a squeezed timeline of NEET and other competitive exam dates. Children would have now lost on basic content as well which they cannot possibly cover so quickly. We don’t only need a revised curriculum, we also need a more accessible platform.
I truly would encourage every country’s education authorities to review our syllabus because “life” should definitely be a subject on there. Would schools want your child to grow up with these questions in an “intellectually challenging” environment or would you rather see students grow into capable young adults that can independently lead their own lives? It is for the education systems to decide and lead the decision.
