I shudder at the thought of being a student again in a school.

One school or system I have found which teaches the basics is the Waldorf school system. They work on various “intelligence” of the child including farming, brick building, language and culture etc.

They think of colours, rhythms, time of day and other things which effect a child. They believe in comprehension and not just definitions.

For example, I sat in a Waldorf school class in Adelaide to experience their education.

In Maths, they were teaching Probability and the first assignment was understanding the life and story of Pascal. From there the teaching went about how Pascal thought about the ideas he got and how he developed the theory.

In Physics, the summer course was based on building a computer starting from understanding the binary system.

All children would learn painting and I think in class 12 do some self portraits.

Good thing is that they are spread across the world following the same system. A lot of them are in Hyderabad.

BTW, there are no exams as such and marks, grades etc till 9th or 10th standard. Even then it is not the kind we are used to.

Curriculum is flexible and is based on how much a student can adsorb.

The best part is that they teach topics in large chunks. For example: Electricity is taught every day for 2.5 hrs as a main topic for 3 months. Children at the end of 3 months create their own textbook based on their understanding. You have to see it to believe it.

I have decided my daughter will go to that school system.

It is we, parents, who need to be strong to deal with the ’society’ when our children go to these schools.

Suhit

CBSE started off with a good initiative of declaring the grade and not rank. I feel that should be extended to doing away with scores at all. When 90% = 95% (I really feel it is), the kid will probably try to understand more because he anyways can’t get better than an A+. If not that, at least he’ll spend his time not cramming up question banks but for some other interest or hobby.

High time students, parents and the boards realised that the grades and marks are all but one and must I say, unimportant part of the education the child receives. More important is what he learnt from it. Anyone can identify pictures of different strokes in swimming and score a cent percent but when at sea, the only stroke that’ll work is what can make you survive till help is at hand.

I disagree with Viveksh. I feel ICSE provided an ‘all-round’ education without bias towards any one subject. Whereas, CBSE focuses less on literature and more on the Sciences.

School life after 8th standard is horrible. Here is a brief summary of what I see in Tamil Nadu.
a) Schools do not teach 9th and 11th standard syllabus and instead teach 10th and 12th standard syllabus for two years and review twice, to make students score maximum. Top students score 496/500 in 10th and 1195/1200 in 12th. To summarise, incentives matter (irrespective of whether it is right or wrong incentive). As students need to apply for Professional courses (BE,MBBS, etc.) based on the marks scored in 12th, there is mad competition to score highest mark somehow. (Schools want to show 100% pass)

b) This has interesting trends. Most students studying in CBSE upto 10th switchover to state board as it is easier and one could score higher percentage (around 5-10%) which matters a lot. Many schools have decided not to offer 11th and 12th in CBSE due to low demand.

c) After 12th, most students get into BE in ECE or EEE with a dream to work in IT industry. However they donot want to take CS as they feel it is too risky (thinking that ECE will offer them job in telecom or other industry if the demand falls in IT industry). The moment they get into Engineering, they start relaxing for the next four years. They put less than half of the effort the spend in 12th. Result is for all to see in the campus interviews. (adding to the woes is the stupidity of IT companies offering jobs at fifth semester and the students then think they are already arrived and reduce their academic effort further)

d) Last year we had an interesting trend in MBBS admission. Out of the 2000 top ranking students who were offered MBBS admission, over 1000 declined and preferred BE as they could get good starting salaries. Whereas it takes minimum of 10 years to reach good position in MBBS. (That is another big story of disincentives)

e) As you had pointed out earlier, parents add a lot to this mess.

Bottomline:
Education quality takes a big hit and is moving from bad to worse.
A set of wrong incentives and priorities get the whole thing wrong.

When scoring mark is the only priority, even a small part of the basic core does not get into the student’s brain as they tend to mug-up, vomit in the exam and forget completely.

Hope the new HRD minister does something about this.

I remember bunking 90% of my classes from class 8th onwards. We would go in, get our attendance marked and leave to play cricket and often we had been playing cricket between tuition early in the morning and school!! I didn’t even open the class XI and XII organic chemistry book since it differed too much from the organic chemistry I had to study for the IIT JEE so I skipped that subject altogether on the XII ICSE exams.

We realized that getting good marks in class X, XII was not going to get us anywhere by itself and it was not all that important as long as we took care of our undergrad entrance exams, olympiads, etc some of which btw required a lot more work and understanding but was more fun also.