Gains and Setbacks of Education Minister’s Plans

 

Education Minister’s plans of truncating the secondary school curriculum to meet the academic calendar timelines for the entry to tertiary education is fraught with long-term perils. The Minister seems to focus on college entry when really we should be talking about school completion.

There is no denying the fact that 2020 brought untold and unexpected misery in the form of COVID-19 upsetting the end of academic year 2019-20 as well as the commencement of academic year 2020-21 for all secondary and tertiary education. Of course, access is critically important, since a task cannot be completed unless it is begun, but if we devise a plan to increase access without simultaneously working to increase successful completion, the waste of human and financial resources will be enormous. Trimming the secondary school curriculum to meet timelines is a compromise with learning delineated to school-level and this jeopardises the preparation and worthiness of a school pass out to enter the tertiary education.

These are the students who will be forgoing the planned learning at school level and enter higher education with inadequate preparation. Will there be remedial or additional learning planned at the entry point of Higher education in the academic year 2021-22? Or will this turn out to be a national disgrace.

Any plan to ensure timely enrolment of students at tertiary institutions, if it is to achieve its intended social purpose, must work simultaneously to ensure that the entry-cohort is not ill prepared. There is good reason to believe that the Nishank plan would have the opposite effect. Policy that shifts the focus from adequate completion to timely completion is self-defeating in nearly every realm of life.

The problem with this shift is that, were the institutions of higher education to control for selectivity and level of academic preparedness, a lot of school-leaving children at the end of academic year 2020-21 may find themselves failing to find an entry in such institutions. On the contrary, if the institutions of higher education were to offer an easier and less selective entry, they will be saddled with the task of making up for prior deficiencies in learning for the entrants as well as compromising on the so called ‘merit’ of the candidates. Policy should not be designed merely to preserve the existence of any particular colleges and schools or their academic calendars but ensure that they do well what they have been tasked to do.

The Nishank plan appeals to children and parents because it ensures timely delivery of certificates of Senior School completion. Hidden behind such alluring façade of minimising the temporal (time) costs are the long-term economic and social costs that would surface in future.

Any sustainable solution to the problems arising out of COVID-19 have to be an overall cost-optimisation rather than just temporal cost reduction. This will require sensible and responsible action by both policy makers and institutions.

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First published 29 Jan 2021

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