According to a report in The Hindu, the government school teachers were recently told by the Jagtial district administration in Telangana that their pay hike would be deducted if they failed to show 100% results in Secondary School Certificate (SSC) examinations. A good response was seen by the district collector as he spoke to the government high school headmasters in a meeting. They were instructed then that their annual increment would be cut if they failed to achieve the given target. Moreover, he instructed the District Educational Officer to collect an undertaking letter from the teachers and also the headmasters.
School, Education, and Passing System
We are changing the definition of a school with such a decision and turning our school into a factory which will manufacture a ‘product’ without any defects. Factories always focus on 100% production with a minimal amount of product rejection. Those products which are manufactured with defects are rejected in the assembly line and thrown into the dustbin. We should not turn the school into factories of mass production. Schools are meant for education and not for production. This decision could turn into a disaster because this may lead to harassment of students and teachers. Students will focus on mugging up the coursework, instead of understanding basic concepts behind theories and derivations. Students will be instructed to write and repeat things over and over again. So that they can engulf what is written in the book without utilising its nutrition, which is knowledge.
A Psychological Move
These types of psychological moves have resulted in the failure of our education system. Under the RTE Act, 2009, each and every student shall pass till class 8 and no one can fail a single student. The result of this decision was reportedly not positive as there was a steep rise in the number of students who failed in class 9. Many teachers stopped paying attention towards their students because they knew in their mind, that in the end, all students would pass. So, there was no need of doing hard work. Recently, in August, a survey was done in Delhi government schools and surprisingly, over 70% students from class 6 can’t read a paragraph from their Hindi textbook and 67% could not divide a three-digit number by a single-digit number. This is the result of Delhi which is the capital city of our country. Think about the whole of India. The question arises again. Are we destroying our education in the name of improvement?
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