Syllabus cut insufficient, improper: Academicians

Nagpur: Syllabus reduction approved by the state education department from Std I-XII by 25% has got a thumbs down from many academicians in the city. All agreed that the reduction plan erred on quantity as well as sequence.
Senior academician Anil Louis said cutting of syllabus by mere 25% is insufficient. “Consider the time lost. There are many schools which are yet to fully implement digital classes as both the institutions and parents are facing logistical and technical problems. Like CBSE, we should have gone with a 30% cut,” said Louis.
Ashok Gavhankar, senior principal and general secretary of Vidarbha Junior College Teachers Association (VJUCTA), said the biggest mistake was to reduce topics, not chapters. “After a cursory glance at the detailed PDF they sent us, I have noticed the number of pages they deleted from each chapter. They should have deleted entire chapters, not topics from every chapter,” said Gavhankar.
He added that the idea was to reduce workload for students due to time being lost in the current situation. “To give an example, the idea was to avoid the time a child spent at school. So government reduced two periods from daily schedule. But the child still has to go to school for six days a week, so has the load on child reduced,” he asked. Continuing with the same analogy, Gavhankar said, “The authorities should have kept the number of periods as before but reduced the school week by two days. That would have been actual load reduction.”
Another objection academicians have is about the sequence of chapter deletion. Ashnarayan Tiwari, principal of Adarsh Vidya Mandir (Gandhibagh) which produced top three HSC (commerce) students this year, said, “They (authorities) have reduced many topics starting from chapter I. But due to online classes, many schools and junior colleges have already finished chapter II also. So, this reduction has resulted in waste of efforts by teachers and students. They should have weeded out the last few chapters.”