Tillonia is like any other village in India. Tucked away in the desert of Rajasthan, it was just a parched, impoverished piece of land in the 1970s when the villagers trudged miles to fetch water to survive. That is, until a saviour arrived in the guise of a young graduate from Delhi University. Fired with ambitions to make this desolate wilderness into a decent living space for the villagers, he promised to bring water into their homes – for a price. They must learn to read and write.
Bunker Roy’s romance with Tillonia reads like a fairy tale. The villagers attended his literacy classes. He made water flow to their homes through water diviners, engineers and the villagers themselves. This young graduate knew that education was the key to a better life. The Barefoot College of Tillonia has carried its programmes across several countries today.
Bunker Roy’s experiment with education is inspirational. It is more relevant today for its very pragmatic approach. At a time when the country is reeling under a pandemic and students/parents are anxious about their future, both in terms of their health and careers - our governments, both at the centre as well as in the states are still debating when and how to conduct school final examinations. This is an irony. When a mere 33% of teenagers complete high school every year, out of which a miniscule number had access to online classes during the last 12 months, what purpose does it serve to conduct public exams for them?
Students who were deprived of online teaching will fare miserably. The exams themselves, conducted in unnatural conditions, will be a farce – besides being a risk to both teachers and students. It is high time the governments start thinking out of the box and devise methods to help the students move on rather than demoralise them with more risks and more failures.
The Central Board of Secondary Education (CBSE) conducts its annual school final examinations for 21,271 schools across the country. The Indian School Certificate Examination (ICSE) Board tests the pupils of 2,100 schools, while the National Institute of Open Schooling established by the Government of India tests 3,50,000 students every year in academic and vocational subjects. In addition to these, state boards conduct their annual end of school public examinations for crores of students every year.
According to official reports, over nine lakh candidates appeared in Karnataka for the SSLC exam last year out of which 6,08,336 candidates passed the examination. Does it mean that over three lakh youngsters are fit for nothing? Or can be labelled as failures? Can one gargantuan test conducted at the end of 10 or 12 years of schooling reveal a student’s capability? Or, does it merely exhibit a pupil’s memorising power rather than her power of comprehension and investigation. Conducting one annual examination by invisible examiners will hardly reflect a student’s capability, creativity or intellectual inclination. It is a farce that would demoralise the best.
In this context, it is worth taking a look at India’s first and best education policy popularly known as the Kothari Commission Report. Commenting on external high school examinations conducted by State Boards, it clearly stated that “the certificates issued by the State Boards should mention the candidate’s performance in each subject, but “there should be no remark that he/she has passed or failed in the whole examination.” The perception and sensitivity of this recommendation should have been the guiding force behind subsequent policies – including the much-hyped New Education Policy (NEP) – of the present government. The school final examination, as its very name suggests, should merely indicate - even celebrate - the successful conclusion of the first phase of education.
In pre-independent India, high school leavers were given two kinds of certificates. EPS or Eligible for Public Service, and ECPS which qualified a student for both college or public service. The school final exam conducted by a State Board did not pass or fail a student. It merely opened two doors, one to the world of work and the other to higher studies. If we followed this pattern today, we would not abandon millions of high school students in a vacuum.
By certifying every student as having completed schooling, we will be actually opening out countless opportunities for upward mobility in work or in studies. A comprehensive, standardised entrance test to university education will ensure that only academically motivated students enter the portals of colleges. In other words, we need to establish a proper entrance examination to higher education, rather than a meaningless exit examination after school. The best universities in the world admit students who qualify in entrance tests and not the other way around.
The Board exams conducted today are outdated and unimaginative. The time has come for educationists to put on their thinking caps and come up with fresh ideas of teaching, testing and judging - not only students but those who teach them as well. The best examination system will fail if the teaching in schools is mediocre.