The Central Board of Secondary Education (CBSE) has taken up a call to rule out three crucial chapters domiciled on democracy and diversity in class 10 social science syllabus for final exams (2019-2020), reported Hindustan Times
The education body has struck down three chapters which are: ‘democracy and diversity’, ‘popular struggle and movement’ and ‘challenges to democracy’ from the Democratic Politics Book- I. It further said that these chapters will be assessed in the periodic examinations but will not be evaluated in board examination 2020.
Why dropping of chapters?
This step taken by the CBSE board is directed to its ongoing exercise of reducing the “burden” of the curriculum on students. The board has released a circular which clarified that the chapters will be there on the normal school tests but questions from these chapters will not appear for the final exam. It said, “(these chapters will be) assessed in the periodic tests, but will not be evaluated in the board examination”. In the previous month, NCERT had dropped 3 chapters from Class 9, one of which includes caste conflict through the struggles of the so-called ‘lower caste’.
The relevance of these chapters is indispensable, particularly when our country is a democratic one. The ‘challenges to democracy’ chapter consists of ‘thinking about challenges’, ‘political reforms’ and ‘redefining democracy’. The chapter ‘popular struggles and movements’ talks about the important role of people’s struggle in the expansion of democracy. Whereas, the chapter ‘democracy and diversity’ gives the reader an understanding of the relationship between political competition and social cleavages with reference to the Indian situation.
Teachers and academics rebuff the move
Hindustan Times reported that a government teacher under anonymity said that this move will make students not study these chapters meticulously as they are not in the final exams. She further stressed upon the fact that these chapters are crucial for students to learn. Krishna Kumar, who is a former NCERT chairman frowned upon CBSE calling the shots for altering the syllabus. He said that it should be NCERT which is the legal body to decide the curriculum and not CBSE. Satvinderpal Kaur, professor at Panjab University said that all the chapters are related to each other and dropping any one of them will result in poor understanding among students.
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