What has happened to our education system?
Today I was elated after reading a news article about the Govt Girls Higher Secondary School, Balussery, Kerala, which implemented gender-neutral uniforms for their students. Yet, I was extremely dejected after going through the CBSE Class10 English question paper of Dec 2021. For a population that enjoys 'Men will be men' ads, that encourages films like Arjun Reddy and that remarks after the Nykaa IPO, "Thank You Nykaa, for returning me all the money my wife spent on cosmetics', we are finding new lows each time with our regressive attitude.
There is a particular comprehension passage in the question paper under fire that attracted a lot of criticism from people around the globe for its misogynist tone. I went through the particular passage which is under fire for all the wrong reasons more than once because reading the rubbish (there is no better word to describe it) for the first time, I felt all dizzy after
and let me tell you why the passage was so wrong.
In a nutshell, the passage says men were the authority at home during the older days and women went about managing the household and the kids. The wife was obedient to the husband and the kids were disciplined by positioning the father as the supreme authority. Why so? Because the father was away with work and since the mother was more around with the kids, it will be difficult for her to command her kids. Fast forward now, there are lesser kids in each household and the feminist revolt happened and women joined the workforce. As a result, the wife became more like a friend to the husband. There were more disagreements as to the husband no longer commanding authority and hence the kids became indisciplined eventually.
The whole passage starts by saying teenagers live in a world of their own and the reason is lack of parental authority. We are aware of the fact that as boys and girls reach adolescence, they undergo a lot of hormonal changes due to which they are often perceived as rude and arrogant and a working mother has nothing to do with it. And all this rudeness and attitude will slowly disappear as this teenage phase is over. And how does the parent become the sole authority on shaping a kid's character when the kids are more at school than home from the age of 3 or 4? Doesn't our educational system have some influence?
Now wait for it, it felt like the regressive tone of the whole passage was not enough, one of the choices for a particular question was even frustrating. The question was:
The writer
(a) seems to be a male chauvinist pig/arrogant person
(b) takes a light-hearted approach to life
(c) is a disgruntled husband
(d) has his family's welfare at his heart
I know the options are wrong at so many levels and is sending a wrong message, look at the first option. Why blame reality shows and serials for imbibing foul language on kids when the curriculum itself is twisted. The whole thing was utter bull shit if I may take inspiration from the author's language.
Given the fact that nothing groundbreaking has happened in the Indian education system since independence except for Byju's, the responsibility of the subject matter experts each year is to do some additions (rarely) and deletions (mostly) in the curriculum and set the question paper. Each of the 3 or 4 subject matter experts, who are teachers/professors prepare separate question papers and send them to the Board for approval. Now, they should all have been drunk or drugged, I cannot find a more plausible reason.
Lastly, these kinds of comprehension passages are often excerpts from works of various authors. Now tell me why is it the Board had to select such a misogynist work for setting a question paper for the future generation? Are we in dearth of literary works? Haven't the likes of Ruskin Bond, Arundhati Roy, R K Narayan, Jhumpa Lahiri, Khushwant Singh given us works for a lifetime?
