One board, yes, because the content matter is the same whether you are teaching the ICSE curriculum or the SSC curriculum or the international curriculum. The only differences are in the teaching and assessment strategies. A standardised, diagnostic entrance test at the end of Std X would be appropriate. Parameters can be set. What a 15-year-old ought to know in terms of understanding an application is more than enough. But teachers need to be involved, you cannot have anything with a political colour, you cannot have dictates being given from air-conditioned offices. Go to the villages, go to the municipal schools. We are all from elite schools, upper-middle-class schools, middle-class schools. We have facilities they don't.
Manju Borkar, principal, Billabong High International School: There are advantages as well as disadvantages. But I think, as an educator, we all have to encourage children to face the turbulent world of the future. We all passed out from state boards, at least I have, and today if I can stand here as a principal, I think the education is more or less the same, whichever board you follow.
Are we catering to the needs of the child? There are so many unrealistic expectations from parents. They always feel that others get things more easily. I think the board doesn't make a difference. It is how the teacher looks at it, what is the student-teacher ratio (we have a ratio of 24:2), how the teacher handles the child, whether she satisfies the needs of every child. I think the board really doesn't make a difference.
Aparajita Rana, principal, Greenlawns, Worli: I think having a number of boards brings in diversity. We are a multilingual, multicultural nation and taking in the aspects of rural, urban, semi-urban, semi-rural… so when you are setting up a school, you are looking at your stakeholders. Who are your stakeholders? The parents, the children and the backgrounds they come from. So I have the choice to pick a curriculum that suits my socio-economic scenario. When you talk about one board, are we bringing down the students from urban schools to the rural level or are we trying to put pressure of a certain curriculum on a rural child? Having a number of boards is a very healthy scenario for a country like India. Secondly, it keeps all educationists on their toes. We share ideas, we share the pedagogy that is taking place in various other boards that have come in recently. It is healthy competition.
Revathi Srinivasan, principal, Smt Sulochanadevi Singhania High School: I feel education is of the mind, body, and soul. Somewhere along the way where we are studying education, we are taking it the way history has taken education. Today schools exist because that's what history provided us. If we go back to the pre-British days and British days, that's where education came in. Globalisation brought in other streams. So I think having one board is not realistic.
I think what we need is variety. We need to learn from one another. We need to keep our minds open. But what we have are interfering politicians and the mess they have created. We haven't taken into account rural India or even suburbs of many metros. Also, teaching for the present generation is becoming a profession of last resort.
Effectively I would say that minimum learning competencies have to be attained at every age level. Between 3½ and 4½ what is it that needs to be taught irrespective of which board we belong to? Is our education about qualification? No. We have to prepare our children for life. We have to teach them life skills. We have to make them thinkers, inventors. Are we doing that? We haven't created another Rabindranath Tagore. Why? I'm very happy that present-day schools are evolving, they are trying to adapt, trying to do so many things… but for that, we need the support of a government that doesn't put up obstacles in our path.
Arundhati G Hoskeri, Billabong High, Mahim: One board, according to me, in the Indian context, isn't going to work. If it works, fine, then I'll be the happiest person. But in reality it isn't possible, for the simple reason that we speak so many different languages. All of us are forgetting that we aren't just talking about the minimum population of the urban lot; 70% of India is rural where, as it has been rightly pointed out, there are no facilities for education. So it means we are going to completely mess up the system if we try to have one board.
Secondly, if you try to make one board, you cannot lower the standards of the urban lot and you cannot raise the standards of the rural lot. At the same time, finding teachers in urban areas is so difficult, let alone the rural areas! The call centre system has messed things up to such an extent that it is very difficult to find teachers. They come, improve their skills, and go, because they get Rs25,000 with free food and drinks, pickup, drop, and all that.
As for doing away with the SSC exam, I'm totally against it. For us, we understand, we are imparting knowledge and the clients we cater to, they are all educated. We can persuade them. But for people from rural areas, giving an SSC exam is like getting an IAS degree. Even if they get 40%, it is a huge achievement. Why would you want to take away an achievement from somebody like that?
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