About CBSEi

From the desk of our Senior Advisor - Dr. M. V. Prasad

On Indian Education

The strength and quality of Indian school education is being understood and recognized the world over.  The ability of the Indian school curriculum to address the basic academic, emotional and spiritual evolution of the learners is admired with a sense of awe and wonder.  The fact that the Indian populace has demonstrated their intellectual mastery, their emotional stability,  their adaptability to global cultures is seen as a positive contribution of the school and higher education in the country.  Indian technical education is perceived as one of the best in the world.

Both in terms of the depth in content and time-tested approaches in pedagogy, Indian schools have addressed the needs of the holistic development of the learners.  However, during the last decade and a little before, schools have deviated from their objectives to meet the needs of an examination system, thanks to the rat race for admission into the higher institutions of learning and the consumerist tendencies that are seen in all walks of life.  The schools had to respond to the parental needs and demands; consequently, both content and pedagogy had shifted their paradigm to these immediate needs.

The Changing Scenario

The emergence of the global village brought the global leaders together to the urgency of sharing global resources for common good.  This opened the international gates so that no barriers existed for trade and commerce as these were instruments of enhancing the quality and standard of life for people worldwide.  This cause was facilitated by the strengthening of the information gateways between nations.  The information flow not only motivated the influx of information and knowledge, but threw open multidimensional challenges to the management of knowledge, processing of knowledge, its encapsulation and marketing.

One of the significant impacts of the above changes was felt in the knowledge industry, in particular in universities, colleges and schools.  The large scale migration of students to the knowledge corridors of certain specific universities across the world was proof enough of the emergence of global considerations in learning processes.  Realizing the need as well as the immense opportunity of knowledge marketing across the borders, many countries and their universities saw a fiscal opportunity and converted the educational enterprise into a commercial prospect.  Universities with inimitable records and standards proposed opening their windows to other countries through franchise, sharing of resources, mutual support through recognition of certificates and degrees, pedagogical and logistical support as well as through faculty exchange programmes.

At The School Leval

This phenomenon of intellectual enterprise sharing percolated to the school level initially by many leading schools organizing exchange programmes between their faculties and students.  This further stimulated the idea of providing the international certification for learning at the very doors of the Indian schools.  Consequently, several Boards of education across the borders – the International Baccalaureate, GCE, Canadian and Australian boards – started examining the avenues for recognizing the schools on the Indian soil for affiliation to their boards as well as providing opportunities for the Indian students to appear for their examinations from the Indian soil.

Though they have not been able to work miracles in this country as the foundations of Indian school education have remained strong and purposeful,  their presence could neither be ignored nor marginalized.  Many leading schools under the private sector tend to fall in line with the curriculum of the above boards for some minor reasons which are not by and large different from the curriculum and policies of the Indian Boards, specifically CBSE.

The International Curriculam

CBSE envisages an international curriculum while retaining its genius and Indianness.

1. The international curriculum: The focus of the international curriculum is to provide the much needed flexibility in learning along with introduction of multiple disciplines of learning.  The curriculum is open-ended, pragmatic, skills empowering and ensures standards and quality at par with other curricula implemented at the global level.  The curriculum takes cognizance of the varying needs of the international community and hence will have opportunities for integrating local specific issues related to language, culture and habitat.
   
   
2. The elements of the international curriculum:The curriculum provides a judicious platform for blending the heritage and wisdom of the past with the dynamics of the present and equip the learner to face the challenges of the future.  The content, hence, helps in critical and creative thinking, inquiry, self-paced learning, experiential learning and establishing a knowledge  base that would help in gaining mastery over the discipline and appropriate skills required for practising the discipline.  The disciplines offered under the curriculum include not only the most commonly offered subjects of study like mathematics, science, social sciences but a wide variety of subjects under arts  (visual and performing), humanities and technology.
   
   It is also important to provide options for subjects of inter-disciplinary learning from the secondary level so that the learners are able to think and appreciate coherence and interdependence of nature and systems in the universe.  The curriculum is founded on sound ethical dimensions so that every input of learning empowers the value profile of the learners by instilling the qualities of discrimination, goodness, pursuit of truth, adherence to non-violence, understanding the need for peaceful co-existence, social consciousness and the spirit of independence.
   
   
3. The enabling pedagogy:The curriculum would yield itself to an enabling pedagogy in the classrooms.  The pedagogy would give the freedom to the teacher to design the classroom in the most relevant manner that would facilitate effective learning.  The pedagogy would support interactive learning, peer learning, experiential learning, activity based learning with a specific focus on harmonizing formal learning with information learning.  Enabling children to set hypotheses,  the classroom  would help in questioning, challenging, and novelty in thinking patterns empowered by curiosity, facilitate error analysis recording techniques and help in constructivist learning.
   
   
4. Evaluation:The process of evaluation would be in consonance with the content and the pedagogy adopted.  As the suggestion is to facilitate to empower learning both through the suggested curriculum and the extended curriculum, the pedagogy being interactive, participative and constructive, the evaluation has to become an integral part of the learning process.  The learners need to the assessed in situ and in context. 
   
   The tools adopted for assessment will be multi-pronged in order to provide a holistic picture of the profile and the performance of the learner.  Continuous and comprehensive evaluation is the recommended procedure which should help both in objective as well as credible assessment.  The focus will be on a positive projection of the learner through a pragmatic projection of his competencies both through self assessment and external assessment.  The evaluation will be largely school based except at the terminal secondary stage wherein the evaluation of the major subjects will be through the Board though the school will provide an assessment report of the various competency domains assessed in the school environment.