On Monday, Maharashtra State Minister for School Education Dada Bhuse had announced in the Vidhan Sabha that the State Board will convert to a "CBSE pattern" in a phased manner from 2025-28. The class 1 curriculum would be introduced from 2025 and the board exams of classes 8,10, 12 will be the last ones to shift in 2028. Bhuse said the change will be done according to the New Education Policy (NEP) 2020. Dr Milind Naik, principal of Jnana Prabodhini School and a member of the Maharashtra NEP steering committee, explained what this change would mean for students. He told The Indian Express, “If you look at the 6th grade textbooks now, they just tell students to memorise such and such laws. But the new textbooks will ask the students to observe and do experiments, rather than memorising. The content of science is the same anywhere in the world, but the approach to teaching will be different.” Instead of memory-based questions, said Naik, process based questions would be asked. This would mean that the information would be provided in the exam and the student would be required to process the information and answer. “This is also called competency based evaluation. The student will not be asked ‘What year was Chhatrapati Shivaji Maharaj born in?’, but something like ‘If Chhatrapati Shivaji Maharaj had used this strategy, how would it have affected the war?'." The NEP also makes some scathing remarks about the current nature of board exams. It says that board and entrance exam culture has resulted in the boom of the coaching industry, which does great harm, especially at the secondary school level. This replaces valuable time for true learning with excessive exam coaching and preparation. The policy says that even though board and entrance exams would continue, the need for coaching classes should be eliminated. “The requirement for coaching comes in when one needs repetitive practice to memorise something. But if the need for memorisation is removed and concepts are tested, the need for coaching would also be eliminated. Along with this if the portion size is reduced, we might also see open book tests in the future instead of the tests we have currently.” said Naik. He added that shifting to a CBSE pattern would not mean that the portion would be a copy of CBSE. Any aspects not suitable for Maharashtra, will not be taken. “If we wanted to copy then there was no need for our experts to work on new books, we could have just taken CBSE’s books. But that is not the case,” he added. Mahendra Ganpule, ex-head of the Maharashtra School Principals' Association and a teacher with over three decades of experience, shared his view about why it was necessary to reform the state board curriculum. He said, “It is the general understanding that our students struggle with science and maths education for competitive exams as compared to CBSE board. And this is our fault. Our pure science textbooks are diluted with subjects like computer science and environmental science, which means that pure science in the book is just 60%. It is necessary to make our syllabus equivalent to theirs.” On whether just changing the curriculum would be enough, Ganpule said that an insufficient number of teachers in the state is also a major issue that must be fixed along with a change in curriculum.
