Kerala Hr. Secondary Education is going to dogs

Vaatupura A. Jayaprakash

Higher Secondary Examination paper valuations camps are working in full key all over Kerala, and the results are expected to be out in record time. This year, the Higher Secondary result is bound to find a permanent place in the Guinness book of world records for its historic pass out percentage. This result is going to be manipulated in such a way as to make all other education ministries that have gone past the present one not only incompetent but most student-unfriendly also.

Prior to the valuation camps, the teachers have been given strict instructions not to fail any student who has the least chance to get through the exam. The instructions are funny as well as “Babyish”. The teaching community is all frustrated with these instructions, and they complain that the very system of examination is a mere mockery and there is no use working hard or making a mark in the result table.

All those hard working students are going to be deeply frustrated for their futile efforts to have an edge over others. All are going to have their own edges and not many can claim any meritorious position when it comes to marks and their positioning in a higher education entry-platform where unfortunately it is not going to be the merit or marks that make the real difference but the bales of money the parents vie hard to pay out for a seat.

The government is doing everything possible to help out the management education system to have their field days once the results get out. The most student friendly education environment offered by the education Minister Mr. M. A. Baby gives the following instructions to the teachers who camp in all major cities to value papers.

Let us see a few instructions given to teachers:
· There should not be any attempt to fail a student if he/she has the least quality to win. Examination is to make students win.
· When it comes to English questions, forget about spelling, punctuation and grammar errors. Teachers have no idea what English is without these three.
· Even if the student writes the key word or one of the words that constitute the answer to a question, he/she should be respected with some marks.
· Complete or incomplete are the sentences, if there is an effort to write some nonsense, the teacher should need to be considerate. The aim is to make the candidate pass out.
· Instructions given to Physics teachers are really funny. If there were out-of-the syllabus questions, the candidate should get full marks.
· If the candidate has just written the question number, that is enough to get him or her full marks for that question.
· And for extreme cases, even if the teacher finds the candidate not writing the question number, the teacher should write the number to the out-of-syllabus question and give him/her full marks.
· And finally when the pass and fail proposition is like a cup and lip affair, the candidate should be given enough marks to get him through the exam.
· If the cut off mark (minimum marks to pass-out) is 20 and the candidate gets only 15, the teacher can make it 20 and declare the candidate ‘passed’. So go the instructions.

Where are these children going to end up in? Is this present ministry prepared to give seats for all these students for higher education? Is it wrong to suspect that there is a nexus between higher education institutions and the government?

We all know that the most literate state in the nation is a huge market for higher education institutions in the neighbouring states and this new ‘marking spree’ is offering greater market potentials for these institutions. When the controversy over management seat allocation and fee structure last year was raging in the state for months, these private institutions outside the state had made millions out of paid seats, and now keralite parents have already started biting their nails thinking of their wards plight after these once-in-a-life-time pass-out exercise. Where are they going accommodate all these future aspirants in?

The poor quality curriculum, insufficient academic infrastructure, dilapidated examination exercise and the ridiculous valuation instructions together take the Kerala higher education to dogs for sure. The coming generation is destined to be good for nothing, and the preset Kerala government will be carving a niche for itself for churning out the maximum number of good-for-nothings in a single go. Let them go out passed and the Party is there to get them employment by way of pasting posters, writing graffiti, staging dharnas, shouting slogans and getting beaten by the police of the coming ministries.

Tailpiece: In Kerala education system, things have come to such a pass that it is humanly impossible not to get through an examination. If you sit an exam, you will have to shoulder a ‘passed’ certificate. We cannot complain. Some of our institutions have the rarest reputation for issuing ‘passed’ certificates to those who haven’t written the exam at all. Sitting the exam itself is enough to make one pass out.

Exam fears and the resultant fevers are passé and it is going to be pass, pass, pass all the way from the first standard to 12th standard. After that it is all about engineers and MBAs and doctors and, at times, door-to-door and street-to-street salesmen trying to sell themselves for some pittance.