School trauma
By Nehal Imam
Once again the nation faces the trauma of exams. Admittedly, it is a short-term affliction -- once exams are over we recover a little though we do little to improve the longer term prognosis.
There are 15 million students in the pre-college educational system, receiving more "schooling" than "education". Their troubles have little to do with learning and everything to do with a school system that has turned exams into a collective trauma.
We talk a great deal about modernising education and revamping curricula but do nothing about the exams. But having spent time comparing the domestic curricula with international ones it seems to me the curriculum is perfectly adequate. Our problems, rather, centre on the way students are assessed.
Elsewhere students are assessed continuously. Subjects are tackled in stages and students graded according to their performance in each of the stages. At each stage the student is asked to do some activity -- research, literary and artistic projects for example -- to ensure that they are active participants in the educational process, not just vessels for ready-to-serve knowledge. This is the type of approach we need to introduce in our school system. This may not be an original idea, but it will go a long way towards alleviating our collective exam trauma.
* This week's Soapbox speaker is an assistant lecturer at the Academy of Arts.
