The central government has decided to reduce the syllabus of National Council for Educational Research and Training (NCERT) by half, a move that it expects will improve students overall development and ensure that they do not remain confined to just books.
The new syllabus, regarding which internal deliberations have been happening for some time now, is likely to come into effect by 2019.
The move has been on the anvil for some time now. Ever since Prakash Javadekar took over as the Minister for Human Resource Development in the year 2016, he has been talking about reducing the school syllabus and now the ministry is now finally giving shape to the idea.
Making this announcement on Saturday, Javadekar, in an interview to Rajya Sabha TV, said that the school syllabus is more than that of BA and BCom courses, and it needed to be reduced by half.
"At the stage of development of cognitive skills, students need to be given full freedom. I have asked NCERT to reduce the syllabus by half and it will be effective from the 2019 academic session," he told Rajya Sabha TV.
Advocating the move, a government official said that this step is being taken so that students get more time for overall development.
A similar move was taken by the Aam Aadmi Party-led Delhi government in 2015.
The Delhi government had reduced their syllabus by 25 percent to accommodate more skill development and co-curricular activities for students. As a pilot project, they applied the new syllabus to Classes 6 to 8, and later extended it to higher classes.
Speaking to DNA, a senior official in the HRD Ministry said, "NCERT has been asked to form a committee that will look into how this idea can be implemented, what can be reduced from the syllabus and what should be retained. This is at a very initial stage right now and more like an idea currently."
Suggestions from the committee will be presented before the Central Advisory Board of Education (CABE) committee, which is the highest decision-making body on all matters related to education, before it is finalised.
Education experts have given mixed reactions to the idea, while they say that it is a welcome move, it should be well thought through. Professor Janaki Rajan, professor at Institute of Advanced Studies in Education at Jamia Milia Islamia University, said, "NCERT textbooks are anyway very well crafted, so the government needs to be very careful about what they plan to retain and what they want to reduce from the syllabus. It is not that the syllabus is not being completed in time."
"Probably Class 1 books need to be re-oriented but not Class 4 and above, they are already teaching what they should be teaching. This is exactly what the AAP government did, they just reduced the syllabus by 2 per cent and a lot of important things went away with that," she added.
Meanwhile, Ruchi, a PhD scholar in Education, who is also teaches at a private school in Delhi, highlighted the importance of in-depth studies. "Studying a subject indepth is also very important. Students realise the importance once they reach higher classes. Just reducing the syllabus won't work. It has to be a very well-thought of move," she told DNA.
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