Pradeep Padgaonkar
Goa Board SSC Results are out. Congratulations to all those who have passed! Best wishes to those who didn’t succeed! Now the routine comparisons will begin and will go on for a few days. It is a regular trend from which no one wishes to shift.
Most of the print and electronic media headlines speak like 10th Result 2024 Declared: 92.38 % Pass, percentage declines, girls ahead. Then the statistics of each school will be announced, as to how many distinctions, 1st classes etc; how many times the school has consecutively obtained 100% students passing and so on. What next? Does any institution keep a follow-up of all distinction and first class students and are able to furnish information about their present after 20 years?
3 Idiots is one of the best educational movies in the Indian film industry. The film follows the story of three friends studying in an Indian engineering college and is a satire about the social pressures under the present Indian education system. We can learn many valuable lessons from this movie.
Try to do our job with dedication so that we can be able to do it. You are the only one who can do that because you have the devotion and love to do it. This is the key to success! Don’t chase success, chase excellence and success will follow. The “3 Idiots” movie teaches us that a certificate is nothing more than a piece of paper. Real education is to acquire knowledge.
I also remembered Taare Zameen Par. It explores the life and imagination of an artistically gifted 8-year-old boy whose poor academic performance leads his parents to send him to a boarding school, where a teacher suspects that he is dyslexic and helps him overcome his reading disorder. The parents, teachers and the community were not aware of this particular kind of disorder of that student, nor did they make an attempt to understand him.
The Central Government has now come out with a National Education Policy. The Policy lays particular emphasis on the development of the creative potential of each individual. It is based on the principle that education must develop not only cognitive capacities – both the ‘foundational capacities ’of literacy and numeracy and ‘higher-order’ cognitive capacities, such as critical thinking and problem-solving – but also social, ethical, and emotional capacities and dispositions.
The rich heritage of ancient and eternal Indian knowledge and thought has been a guiding light for this Policy. Teaching and learning will be conducted in a more interactive manner; questions will be encouraged, and classroom sessions will regularly contain more fun, creative, collaborative, and exploratory activities for students for deeper and more experiential learning.
It is well understood that young children learn and grasp nontrivial concepts more quickly in their home language/mother tongue. Home language is usually the same language as the mother tongue or that which is spoken by local communities. Thereafter, the home/local language shall continue to be taught as a language wherever possible. This will be followed by both public and private schools.
Goa State Government is bent on implementing the policy from this academic year itself when there is scope to do so by 2027. It is not advisable to go ahead in haste (once again competition to prove that our state was the first in the country to implement) infrastructure and all other complementing services. Also, it remains to be seen if the Government will start primary education in the local language as mentioned in the policy.
Finally, request to all the parents. Avoid competition, understand and recognize the abilities and passion of your child and encourage them to decide. Let’s not race. All the Best!
