One of the most hare-brained schemes in recent times was almost put to work in Maharashtra. The State’s Board for Secondary Education was about to hold a ‘Primary School Certificate Examination’. Children as young as nine or 10 years were to be subjected to full-scale external examination, probably with neutral venues, external invigilators and all. To educationists everywhere, this is unacceptable and, in fact, symptomatic of the anarchy that has come to dominate our school education system.NCERT alerted the state government to the pitfalls of such a policy. But some in Maharashtra were convinced of its administrative advantages — somebody said something about its efficacy in making teachers teach with greater accountability. The state administration issued two notifications over July and August 2002 which announced that the first such examination would be held in April 2003. Thankfully, judicial intervention saved the day after two non-government organisations moved the Bombay High Court.The children of Maharashtra and their parents may have heaved a sigh of relief for the time being, but in other states, they are still nervous. In Delhi one hears of movement towards having these examinations in the schools run by the city’s municipal body. All this is happening in a global environment of progressive dependence on internal evaluation rather than public, state-organised examinations which breed corruption of various kinds. But the intellectuals who call themselves progressive and liberal are not protesting this time. They are ever-ready for denigrating the reforms in education carried out by the central government, but when some states take retrograde steps, their silence screams.The Sarvapalli Radhakrishnan Commission (December 1948-August 1949) made this historic observation: ‘‘If we are to suggest one single reform in Indian education it should be that of the examinations’’. It put forth the Indian dilemma very succinctly. Nobody can deny that under the circumstances — huge population, uneven job to candidates ratio and the popular mindset which respects marks and ranks — examinations cannot be wished away in India. So, to minimise their impact, successive commissions, notable among them the Kothari Commission (1964-66) and its 1986 version, suggested in-built checks and balances. The subjective element in marking a candidate can play a disastrous role. So the NCERT’s National Curriculum Framework 2000 made a case for replacing marks with grades.The Kothari Commission’s report is regarded as one of the most outstanding documents on Indian education. It ruled: we do not think it necessary or desirable to prescribe a rigidly uniform level of attainment for all the primary school pupils in a state or even in a district through an external examination. Instead of creating incentives for better teaching, the external examination intended for all will saddle teachers with standardised programmes and encourage the process of rote memorisation which is the besetting evil of teaching and learning methods in our schools today. we therefore recommend that no compulsory external examination should be held at the end of the primary school stage.The private tuition system has come to stay in our society. It is accentuating the class divide with more vehemence than before. Now, if this regime takes over in the primary stage, the same pernicious system that has already destroyed the level playing field at the Class 10 and 12 levels, will take over. We may be landed with the spectre of eliminating the economically weak sections from the education system at a juncture when the task of persuading the poor to spare their young for a full education is recognised as a national priority.Let us for a moment consider what effect poor performance or failure would have on the mind of a child of nine. As it is, he has been exposed to an examination system which is not recognised by anybody who knows anything about pedagogy. In my career as an educationist, I have not come across a single monograph on how to examine a nine-year-old. Maybe the Maharashtra bureaucracy knows better. But to education professionals, this sounds like the recipe for disaster.(The writer is director, NCERT)
