The recent decision of the CBSE to completely delete chapters on federalism, citizenship, nationalism and secularism from the political science curriculum of class 11 makes me jealous of the class 11 children. Where were such helping School Regulatory Boards when I was in school saddled with heavy syllabus in almost every subject.?
Take arithmetic: In the chapter on ratio and proportion , we were asked to work out the proportion of water in milk after a dishonest milk seller went on adding equal quantity of water after each sale. Apart from the difficulty in answering, this encouraged adultratration and dishonesty
In algebra and trignometry, it was all right to learn the formulae by heart and use them in solving questions.What was the need to derive them from first principles?. Avoidable waste of time .
My problem in English was its grammar, particularly what is known as parsing of sentences. The different kinds of clauses and what word they qualified would have turned even Johnson to take to writing in Latin. It was no different in the case of Hindi where the verb determined the gender ! And in Sanskrit I dropped out in the second week of classes when I was told that the verb depended not just on the gender but its number, tense etc. Grammar ,as I understood later in life, is discipline but the best works in any literature pays not much respect to grammar. In poetry learning in all languages we were expected to not just paraphrase but to go beyond to describe what the poet had in mind writing that piece/stanza.
Free -hand drawing of maps as part of Geography and remembering dates and and quoting historians in answers to questions in History were the other nuisense.
The present day school children are fortunate to have less load to study causing envy in persons like me
Take arithmetic: In the chapter on ratio and proportion , we were asked to work out the proportion of water in milk after a dishonest milk seller went on adding equal quantity of water after each sale. Apart from the difficulty in answering, this encouraged adultratration and dishonesty
In algebra and trignometry, it was all right to learn the formulae by heart and use them in solving questions.What was the need to derive them from first principles?. Avoidable waste of time .
My problem in English was its grammar, particularly what is known as parsing of sentences. The different kinds of clauses and what word they qualified would have turned even Johnson to take to writing in Latin. It was no different in the case of Hindi where the verb determined the gender ! And in Sanskrit I dropped out in the second week of classes when I was told that the verb depended not just on the gender but its number, tense etc. Grammar ,as I understood later in life, is discipline but the best works in any literature pays not much respect to grammar. In poetry learning in all languages we were expected to not just paraphrase but to go beyond to describe what the poet had in mind writing that piece/stanza.
Free -hand drawing of maps as part of Geography and remembering dates and and quoting historians in answers to questions in History were the other nuisense.
The present day school children are fortunate to have less load to study causing envy in persons like me
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