COIMBATORE: The Centre may soon come up with a new guideline to ‘lighten the burden of school children’, which includes asking schools to frame a well designed timetable for each section so that children need not carry too many books to school each day. A decision is likely to be taken at the first meeting of the recently reconstituted Central Advisory Board on Education (CABE), to be held on Wednesday.
The proposed guideline also asks schools to ensure that the co-curricular activity periods are held along with the other periods on a daily basis, thereby having an equitable distribution of weight of school bags.
It also urges parents to buy their children bags that are light-weight and comfortable to carry. The students should be discouraged from bringing reference books and other books to school especially in senior classes. The books of children up to class II should be maintained and kept in the school itself.A system of class libraries should be supported in order to promote reading habits.
“The growing weight of school bags and its effect on the health of children has become a matter of grave concern for parents. There is a need to forge partnerships among curriculum developers, school functionaries, parents and other stakeholders in this regard. The integration of ICT into education may significantly impact the problem of heavy school bags” the 63rd CABE meeting agenda note says.
Commenting on this, PB Prince Gajendra Babu, general secretary, State Platform for Common School System said, “The Yashpal Committee report suggest learning without burden saying that children should go to school without bags, and textbooks should be kept in the class library for references.To achieve this, we should have some basic reforms. There should be a teacher per classroom and there should be qualified language teachers for phonetics and grammar. Apart from this, the neighbourhood school concept needs to be practiced. Without these fundamental changes, learning without burden is impossible.”