Rush to release new curriculum led to errors in TN textbooks: Officials
With the new textbooks brought out by the state as part of its major curriculum revamp to enable TN students to perform better in national eligibility tests being riddled with several errors, highly-placed sources in the State Council of Educational Research Training (SCERT) pointed out major flaws in the curriculum development process leading to such glaring errors.
By : migrator
Update: 2018-06-22 19:36 GMT
Chennai
While it usually takes at least five years for such a major revamp of school curriculum, the education department had completed the process in less than two years, thus bypassing several mandatory quality checks. One of the most conspicuous flaws, according to experts, is the lack of adequate proof reading of the new textbooks. “While the norm is to get each textbook proof read at least 20 times, most of these books went through roughly four or five rounds of proof reading only,” a senior educationist who was involved in the process told DT Next.
Also, whenever such a huge effort is taken up, a full draft of the revised curriculum is put out more than once for comments, feedback and corrections, if any, from the academic fraternity before it goes to print for distribution. “This process was also compromised due to the time crunch which has led to children being forced to study erroneous information,” the source added.
In 2017, the Tamil Nadu government had announced the new syllabus plan for Class 1, 6, 9 and 11 students studying in the State board. Over thousand teachers, more than 500 translators and a total of 200 professors were involved in preparing the new curriculum for the last two years.
At the SCERT, the state curriculum framework had also famously done away with all kinds of stereotypes to create a democratic and innovative system of learning including introduction of QR codes and downloading links in the course materials.
S Natraja Subramanian, a trainer of Tamil Nadu Public Service Commission (TNPSC) exams, who was among those who pointed out the mistakes, said though he had contacted the government authorities several times to correct the errors, the officials failed to act on it. “Most of the errors could be figured out in Class 11 textbooks of Economy, Geography, History and Tamil and Class 9 textbooks of Social Science, Economy and Tamil,” he said, adding even textbooks of Class 9 and 6 have a series of errors”. PK Illamaran, president, Tamil Nadu Teachers Association,
said, “The proof reading officials were forced to complete their work within a month. They should have proof read at least 20 times before sending them to print. However, it was not done,” he said.
PB Prince Gajendra Babu, General Secretary, State Platform for Common School System, said if there are mistakes and if they are proved genuine, they should be placed before the authorities.
“If the officials find that the so-called mistakes are in fact correct, they have to send errata immediately to rectify it,” he added. When contacted, SCERT director Dr G Arivoili said that while preparing new syllabus, errors are bound to crop up in textbooks.
Education Department sources also admitted that not only lack of proof reading, but the government failing to release another draft to ensure error-free textbooks led to the mistakes.
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