Professional Documents
Culture Documents
The Mandate
Charter of NCERT envisages a special place for designing curriculum. NCERT expected to review school curriculum as a regular activity ensuring the highest standards of rigour National Policy on Education, 1986 assigns a special role to NCERT in preparing and promoting a National Curriculum Framework.
NCF structures
National Steering Committee set up
NSC comprised 35 members including scholars, principals and teachers, NGO representatives and NCERT faculty
NSC supported by 21 National Focus Groups to prepare well researched Position Papers NFGs chaired by renowned scholars and practitioners
Systemic Reform:
Aims of Education, Systemic Reform for Curricular Change, Curriculum, syllabus and textbooks, Teacher Education for curriculum renewal, Examination reforms, Work & Education, Educational Technology, Heritage Crafts
National Concerns
Problems of SC/ST children, Gender, Problems of children with special needs, Peace Education
Unprecedented media debates Advertisements inviting suggestions placed in 28 national and regional dailies
Over 2000 responses received
A mothers response
Our syllabus gets more massive and moves beyond the teaching capacity of the teachers so they rush through the contents with tedious methodology. Students cannot meet the attention span requirement in the classrooms and either fail at comprehension or blank out into daydreaming. Newer topics of many different subjects are covered even before the previous ones have been chewed over. The burden of the syllabus is then passed on to the parents or tuition classes. Little children burdened with loads of education on their shoulders trip from school to tuition classes, bypassing childhood. A section of students study harder and harder to beat each other to the top slot. Majority of the students are hounded by parents and teachers to study harder and become stressed, some requiring even clinical treatment.
Perspectives Learning and knowledge Curricular areas, school stages and assessment School and classroom environment Systemic reform
Perspectives
Provides the historical backdrop; recalls NPE statement on curricular framework NPE Revolves around the question of curriculum load on children
Information often confused for knowledge. Tendency to teach everything arises from our lack of faith in childrens creative instincts. Demand for inclusion of new topics/subjects results in disjointed syllabi; encyclopaedic textbooks, and traumatic exams.
Perspectives
Proposes guiding principles for curriculum development
Connecting knowledge to life outside the school Ensuring that learning shifts away from rote methods Enriching curriculum so that it goes beyond textbooks Making examinations flexible
Perspectives
Describes the social context of education - hierarchies of caste, economic status, gender relations that influence access and participation. Cautions against pressures to commodify schools and application of market related concepts to schools and school quality Discusses the aims of education Building commitment to democratic values of equality, justice, freedom, concern for others well being, secularism and respect for human dignity and rights.
Learning tasks must be designed to enable children to seek out knowledge from sites other than textbooks. Need therefore to move away from rigid lesson planning to planning and designing activities that challenge children to think and try out what they are learning.
Science
Should be recast to enable children to examine and analyze everyday experiences Environment Education should become part of every subject thru wide range of activities involving outdoor project work
Health and Physical Education Success in school depends on nutrition and well planned physical activities.
Systemic reform
Systemic Reform
Covers need for academic planning for monitoring quality Reaffirms faith in local self government Proposes systematic activity mapping of functions appropriate at relevant levels of local self government Simultaneously ensuring financial autonomy on the basis of the funds-must-follow-functions principle.
Systemic Reform
Teacher education should focus on developing professional identity of the teacher Examination reforms to reduce psychological stress, particularly on children in class X and XII Recommends changing the typology of questions so that reasoning and creative abilities replace rote learning
Udega to saaton aasmaano ki khabar le aayega. Udaaoge to chhat pe jaakar baith jayega.
across the infinite skies; Were you to make her fly, she would but confine herself to sitting on the rooftop)
Future Steps
Development of syllabi and textbooks based on the following considerations: Appropriateness of topics and themes for relevant stages of childrens development Continuity from one level to the next Pervasive resonance of the values enshrined in the Constitution of India in the organisation of knowledge in all subjects Inter-disciplinary and thematic linkages between topics listed for different school subjects, which fall under discrete disciplinary areas
Future Steps
Linkages between school knowledge in different subjects and childrens everyday experiences Infusion of environment related knowledge and concern in all subjects and at all levels Sensitivity to gender, caste and class parity, peace, health and needs of children with disabilities Integration of work related attitudes and values in every subject and at all levels Need to nurture aesthetic sensibility and values
Future Steps
Linkage between school and college syllabi; avoid overlapping Using the potential of media and new information technology in all subjects Encouraging flexibility and creativity in all areas of knowledge and its construction by children
Learning tasks must be designed to enable children to seek out knowledge from sites other than textbooks. Need therefore to move away from the Herbartian lesson plan to preparing plans and activities that challenge children to think and try out what they are learning.