The Hindu : Tamil Nadu / Chennai News : “Textbooks must reflect children’s physical realities”

Online edition of India's National Newspaper
Tuesday, Nov 24, 2009
ePaper | Mobile/PDA Version

Tamil Nadu

Tamil Nadu - Chennai

“Textbooks must reflect children’s physical realities”

Staff Reporter

Symposium on ‘Strategies for development of textbooks’

— Photo: R. Ragu

A lighter moment: Thangam Thennarasu, School Education Minister with Krishna Kumar, Director, NCERT, at a symposium in Chennai on Monday.

CHENNAI: Those involved in writing school textbooks should keep in mind the diversity of children’s experiences.

It is very important to capture as many vignettes of children’s physical realities as possible in textbooks, according to Krishna Kumar, Director of the National Council of Education Research and Training (NCERT).

He was speaking at a symposium on ‘Strategies for development of textbooks,’ organised by the Directorate of Teacher Education Research and Training (DTERT) here on Monday. It was organised to facilitate discussions among authors working on new textbooks for the implementation of Equitable Standard Education.

Professor Krishna Kumar said National Curriculum Framework (NCF) 2005 was all about contextualising education and creating a richer interaction between children and their milieu, through geography, specific history, language and culture.

Pointing to the principles of NCF, he said it gave emphasis to linking a child’s life outside school to what is taught in class.

“We should allow children to use that experience to construct knowledge inside school.” There was a tendency to portray boys as the norm, Professor Kumar said, highlighting the need to represent the lives of girls, too, as boys and girls often led very different lives. “I am not going into a critique of patriarchy here,” he said, observing that it was about the need to create the feeling of “I am there in that textbook” for all children.

Referring to a question raised by writer R.K. Narayan in the early 1990s in the Rajya Sabha on the stress children were put through, he said that the then government had constituted a national-level committee to look into the issue.

Students’ stress

The committee, which included Professor Yashpal and Professor Kumar, brought out a booklet titled ‘Learning without Burden’. “There is a pervasive kind of stress…I cannot think of anyone who is not worried about children. Why is the system so stressful?” he asked, adding that living in a peaceful environment was a necessary condition for learning, and particularly creative learning.

“Time is the issue that is at the heart of the problem.” A teacher is often expected to cover the syllabus within a particular time, while children must actually discover things.

“Time has become so scarce and it is not surprising that the aims of education fail in such an environment.” Pointing to one of the “most ironical” things about kindergarten education where children are made to sing “Twinkle, twinkle little star, How I wonder what you are…” he said it was difficult to find teachers who would let questions be and allow children to wonder.

On draft syllabus

Sharing feedback based on discussions he had with his colleagues at the NCERT on the draft syllabus of Tamil Nadu’s Equitable Standard Education, he said the mathematics syllabus had allowed for a slow pace, but it could be slower.

On the science curriculum, he said that his colleagues felt it was too dense and did not factor in enough time for activities.

Making another “strong plea” to textbook writers, he urged them to make a fundamental difference between early primary education and higher classes, as there was a basic difference between childhood (5-8 years) and later in terms of learning.

“Our system focusses too much on upper primary, treating every class as a preparatory phase for the subsequent class.”

Textbooks could include real stories of real children, besides references to additional learning material and notes to teachers. “We should also remember that textbooks are not the end of learning, they are just one source.”

School Education Minister Thangam Thennarasu said that the final syllabus would be ready in about five days’ time and that feedback received from different stakeholders had been taken into consideration.

State Planning Commission vice-chairman M. Naganathan suggested that a State academic council be formed for school education to reflect on the syllabus periodically.

Printer friendly page
Send this article to Friends by E-Mail

Tamil Nadu