Rethinking Schooling for the 21st Century

eform exercise, the NCERT instead took the view that peace education should
serve as a perspective for syllabus and textbook development across all subjects.
This approach was seen as opening the way for values to be incorporated into the
curriculum without providing for a separate moral education class. However, the
more conventional teaching of moral education continues to be popular in many
of India’s private schools, and textbooks for this subject, published by private
publishers, are widely sold, in many cases across national borders. These typically
offer stories from different religions as the core ‘content’ of moral education,
which is sometimes termed ‘peace education’. The practice of using music
education for quasi-religious education is also quite common, although research
or documentation on this issue remains scant.
Both explicitly religious and more secular varieties
of moral education in South Asian schools contribute
to the general ethos and goal of nationalist
socialisation. Political shifts have sometimes caused
the nationalistic ethos of schooling to take on a
militaristic form. From the perspective of sustainable
development and the goal of encouraging a culture
of peace through education, excessive emphasis
on nationalist fervour and rivalry pose a palpable
challenge for educational reform in South Asia.
Both explicitly
religious and more
secular varieties of
moral education in
South Asian schools
contribute to the
general ethos and
goal of nationalist
socialisation
C: Challenges of Competitiveness and Regimentation
A variety of factors, some of them common to other parts of Asia, make South
Asia especially prone to early regimentation and stressful competitiveness
among the young. The factors responsible for these problems are both sociocultural
and systemic in nature. Historical legacies play a substantial role,
contributing to entrenched systemic weaknesses that frustrate aspirations
for reform. The most important among these consists of a public examination
system that ‘fails’ a substantial number of students at different points in their
Private schools use
competitive entry and
sustained monitoring
of the child by means
of test scores to lure
parents, thereby
undermining the
apparently ‘softer’
creative assessment
strategies propagated
by the government
institutional trajectory, starting with primary
grades. Recent attempts to postpone the earliest
public examination are facing serious resistance
on the grounds that children will lose motivation to
study without the looming threat of a high-stakes
test. Post-Jomtien reforms in most South Asian
countries attempted to introduce continuous
assessment in place of the traditional annual
public examinations that brand most children as
failures. Many international organisations were
involved in supporting such efforts, but so far
with decidedly mixed results. Even as government
schools are being pushed to adopt such reforms,
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Chapter 5: South Asia