NEW DELHI, June 16: A Parliamentary Standing Committee on Human Resource Development(HRD) has strongly opposed the policy of automatic upgradation from Class I to VIII, saying it would leave the child without motivation to work hard.
The Committee has sighted the findings of NCERT Learning Achievement Survey of Round I and Round II to support its contention.
In has sought to underline that the main objective of Sarva Shiksha Abhiyan(SSA) and Right to Education(RTE) was to ensure the
right of every child to have elementary education of satisfactory and equitable quality of education which satisfied certain essential norms and standards.
“The Committee feels that students may not be motivated to work hard to learn if they are aware that their promotion to next grade is guaranteed.
The Committee argued that a child might not be mature enough to
understand the implications of his being required to sit for formal examination from class IX onwards and obtain minimum benchmark.
The Parliamentary panel, in its report, has quoted extensively from the Annual Status of Education Report(ASER) Rural-2012 which found that in 2010, 46.3 per cent of all children in Standard V could not read Standard II level text, and also that of all children enrolled in Standard V, 29.1 per cent could not solve simple two digit subtraction problem with borrowing. Moreover, the number of all children in this standard who could not do division problem had increased from 63.8 per cent in 2010 to 72.4 per cent in 2011 and to 75.2 per cent in 2012.
The panel said that these findings put a question mark on the quality of education being imparted to children. It also reflected
that in spite of a number of initiatives taken by the Department under SSA/RTE, learning outcomes for a majority of children did not show much improvement.
Concerted efforts were required to ensure that a minimum of set
of cognitive skills were acquired by all children during eight years of elementary education, it said.
The Committee asked the Department of School Education to rethink on its policy of automatic promotion upto class VIII. (UNI)
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