TED Newsdesk, New Delhi: The Tamil Nadu government has decided to remove 40% of the syllabus of schools across the state. The decision followed the suggestions given by a professional committee in the view of the COVID-19 crisis.
Tamil Nadu schools and the 40% syllabus cut: what was decided
The announcement set out the scale of the cut rather than its contents. For Tamil Nadu schools, K. A. Sengottaiyan said, 40% of the syllabus would stay out of the classroom for the 2020-21 session, leaving teachers to work through the remaining 60% in whatever teaching time the pandemic allowed. The reduction applied to the state board syllabus, with the detailed lists of retained and omitted lessons left to the academic machinery to publish later in the year.
On Friday, K. A. Sengottaiyan, the Minister for School Education of Tamil Nadu, talked about the state government’s decision to reduce the syllabus for students as schools are closed due to Coronavirus. He said that a committee of 18 members was formed to review the matter of shortening the course for the session 2020-21. Based on the committee’s report the government has directed the schools to proceed with 60% of the syllabus for the current academic year.
On May 12, the committee was established under the supervision of Sigy Thomas Vaidhyan, Commissioner of School Education. It examines the issues related to the education sector during the lockdown and subsequent closure of institutions. Additionally, it looks into the matter of the delay in new sessions during the pandemic and to find the solutions for the smooth running of the teaching-learning process.
As per the minister’s statements, the government and government-funded schools can consult the experts through Kalvi Television every Saturday. These consultation sessions last for almost six hours.
The television channel carried more weight in Tamil Nadu’s pandemic response than its modest name suggests. With campuses shut and smartphone access uneven across the state’s households, a broadcast channel reached students whom app-based classes could not, and the Saturday consultation slots gave teachers in government and aided schools a standing route to subject experts while staff rooms stayed empty. The syllabus cut and the broadcast timetable were two halves of the same calculation: less content, delivered through whatever channel actually reached a child.
How the cut was made
The work of deciding what to drop fell to the State Council of Educational Research and Training, which prepared the prioritised content on which examinations would be based, with the 18-member committee shortlisting the portions, The News Minute later reported. Across Tamil Nadu schools, the committee concluded, 40% of the syllabus could be set aside for a year without blocking a student’s progression to the next class. The deleted portions were to be omitted from question papers rather than from the textbooks themselves, which had already been printed and distributed.
That design put the burden on examiners rather than publishers. Question setters would work from the prioritised lists, teachers would pace the year against them, and students revising from full textbooks needed to know, chapter by chapter, what would not be asked. The gap between a September announcement of the percentage and the eventual publication of the lists became the period parents and school associations spent asking for clarity, since no revision plan could be drawn up against a number alone.
Mr Sengottaiyan inaugurated developmental schemes worth Rs. 2.40 crores at Nambiyur in Gobichettipalayam. Later in an interview, Mr Sengottaiyan assured that the new syllabus of the State Board will enable the students to sit in various academic and scholarship tests organized by the Government of India. He added the Tamil Nadu State Board books were the source of maximum questions (90 out of 180) that appeared in the National Eligibility-cum-Entrance Test (NEET) 2020.
The stakes of that assurance were real. State board marks feed the engineering admissions counselling run through Anna University, and any suspicion that a slimmer syllabus would leave state board candidates behind their CBSE peers in national tests would have pushed more families towards private coaching at exactly the moment household incomes were under strain.
Since then: a reopening, then no exams at all
The promised documents took time. The reduced syllabus for classes 10 and 12 was published on 17 January 2021, two days before those classes returned to Tamil Nadu schools on 19 January after more than eight months of closure, according to The News Minute. Even the trimmed course proved too much for the year. On 25 February 2021, Chief Minister Edappadi K. Palaniswami told the state assembly that students of classes 9, 10 and 11 under the state syllabus would write no examinations at all for 2020-21 and stood declared as having passed, with detailed score assessment protocols to follow, The News Minute reported.
Class 12 examinations, normally a March fixture, were pushed back and timetabled for 3 to 21 May 2021 by the Directorate of Government Examinations. K. A. Sengottaiyan had promised that 40% of the syllabus in Tamil Nadu schools would go; by the end of the academic year, for three entire cohorts, the examinations went with it.
The Class 12 cohort, the one group still scheduled for the examination hall, was to be tested on the prioritised syllabus the SCERT had drawn up, which made the January publication the operative document for the only state board examination left standing in the calendar. The 40% figure announced at Nambiyur in September 2020 thus ended up governing a single examination season, but it set a precedent: when the calendar collapses, the state would rather shrink the course than fail the cohort, and the apparatus for deciding what can safely be dropped, committee, SCERT lists and broadcast support, now exists on file for the next disruption.
