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Boxed In
The poor
showing of Kolkata schools in the state's higher secondary exams sparks
off a heated debate on whether they should opt for the central boards.
India Today's Labonita Ghosh takes a look at the merits and demerits.
Every year, results of the school-leaving
higher secondary
examinations in West Bengal come with their own little puzzles.
Incomplete marksheets, bitter upsets and—in some extreme
cases—a spate of suicides. But there is one conundrum that
Kolkata's schools are still trying to work out: how, for the past
few years, they have been eased out of the exam's prestigious
merit list by the district schools. If July is a testing time for
Bengal's students, it's more so for the ones in the city. This
year was no different. Out of the 31 students who made it to
the council's Top 20, only five were from Kolkata schools. A full
circle since 1999, when out of an equal number of toppers,
Kolkata's school did far better than their country cousins. As HS
Council President Dr Jyotirmoy Mukhopadhyay proudly puts it,
this year, the HS Top 20 features at least one student from 15
of Bengal's 19 districts. So what if Kolkata is under-represented?
Educationists and principals of city schools, who have been
watching this downslide with some alarm, were outraged. Many were convinced
that this trend "fits in very well with the Left Front government's
district bias".
Education
department officials, understandably, prefer to play
down these allegations as typical urban snobbery. "It's sad that
Kolkata's teachers, instead of appreciating the efforts of the
district students, are diminishing their achievements," says Dr
Mukhopadhyay. But that's not all they're doing. Many of the city's "elite"
schools are now thinking of breaking away from the HS Board for something
"more pliable". Some are simply contemplating the move; others
have already applied for a No Objection Certificate from the government
to go ahead with affiliations to ICSE, ISC or CBSE boards.
With 2,864
institutions and over 2.6 lakh on its rolls, the Higher
Secondary Board has more than six times the number of takers for central
boards. But the gap is closing fast. Five years ago,
Bengal had only 130 schools offering the Indian School
Certificate examination (ISC); Today, it has over 200. And if Kolkata's
institutions haven't been producing toppers, it's because the best and
brightest, it seems, no longer want to be a part of the state's education
system.
Many of
the schools wanting to switch over have inherent reasons for it. According
to Devi Kar, principal of Modern High School which recently got the go-ahead
from the state to introduce ISC in Class XII, students looking beyond
Bengal for a career inevitably prefer a central board. For one thing,
by the time the HS results are out, most are no longer eligible for national
competitive exams. Then, the HS syllabus, arduous and detailed, leaves
students hopelessly ill-equipped for post-school exams. Consider this:
out of the 500-odd youngsters who make
it to the Indian Institute of Technology, Kharagpur after passing the
JEE, only 37 per cent are from state boards all over the country (Bengal
contributes a measly 5 or 7 per cent). More
than half are CBSE students. "No matter how well they do in
the higher secondary exams, the toppers never seem to make
a mark in the JEE," says IIT-KGP deputy director S.K. Lahiri. "They're
completely outclassed by central board students."
Students
from the so-called "better" schools in Kolkata have
stopped relying on the HS as an index of their abilities.
Strangely, Christian-run institutions like Loreto House and St
Lawrence rarely produce an HS topper. Yet its students shine at
colleges outside Bengal. Then there is the shadow of erratic
evaluation. "In higher secondary, some subjects are simply not
scoring," says Kar. "That's why students opt for topics which
will bring them marks, even though it may not be what they want to do."
Newer institutions
like Laxmipat Singhania Academy, have opted out of the HS Board right
from the start. When she started the school in 1996, principal Anjali
Razdan says she still had to get
an NOC from the state government to introduce a CBSE curriculum. "The
Bengal board's syllabus has probably not been changed for years,"
cites Razdan. "I wanted a more dynamic system." Schools from
St Xaviers, which had parallel board systems, are slowly finding there
are no takers for the Bengal boards. A few unfortunate English-medium
institutions, tied to the state because of the Dearness Allowance, are
simply waiting for a chance to move out. "If the DA clause is removed,"
says Father Thottam of St Lawrence School, "there will be a rush
for central boards." Moreover, the state government, after making
much of its star performers (no other Board brings out a Top 20 list),
leaves them to fend for themselves.
According
to Society for Nature, Education and Health, a Kolkata
NGO that runs a career helpline, about 70 per cent of the
telephone calls are from students in the districts who have no
idea about their options. The government does not have a single
career guidance or counselling cell in the state because it has
no one to run them.
With so
much finger pointing, the education department finds
itself boxed in. Recently minister Kanti Biswas said he
encourages schools to opt for central boards because it would eventually
help industrialisation in the state. At the heart of his generous declaration
is a study that claims the government must open up its insular system
of education to invite investors (and their families) in. Still, reluctant
to ease its stranglehold over schools, the state has added a clever rider
to the recently disbursed NOCs: All schools will have to set aside 10
per cent of their seats for candidates recommended by the government,
and provide free education to 50 per cent of such students. Alongside,
it also plans a shakeup—better infrastructure, more discipline and
a completely revised syllabus by 2004. Problem is, by the time it happens,
the state may no longer find any takers for what it is offering.
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