Offbeat Courses Get Thumbs Down?
CHENNAI: Months after the CBSE introduced Legal Studies and Theatre Studies among its class 11 courses, schools in the city are yet to warm up to the idea. Non-traditional courses like these two new courses are rarely opted and are thus facing a shut down.
“No school in the city has applied for the Legal Studies course. The same is likely to be true for theatre studies as well. While there are some parents who seem to be extremely interested in courses like Legal Studies, there are several challenges in introducing such non-traditional courses for the school students. For one, we need at least 20 per cent of the students to opt for the course for it to be viable. Secondly, there also needs to be enough takers through the years, since we cannot discontinue the faculty once they have been appointed,” says Ajeeth Prasad Jain, Secretary of the Chennai Sahodaya School Complex for CBSE schools.
He points out that while these courses are introduced at the request of schools, they seem to be more in vogue in the northern part of the country. “Since most people here are looking at Engineering or Medicine, the demand here is too conservative for such courses to be taken up,” he said.
Over the years, the CBSE has introduced as many as 186 different courses for its Class 11 and 12 students. This includes a wide range that has everything from Bakery Science to Radiation Physics. But schools in the city continue with the traditional Science and Commerce streams, each of which usually has the same four subjects plus English.
Some schools that had taken the plunge had to withdraw them due to lack of patronage.
The Vel’s Vidyashram Senior Secondary School in the city had introduced the Knowledge Traditions and Practices of India with much fanfare, the CBSE Chairman himself launching the course in the city. But today, the course is no more.
“The course had an excellent syllabus. But we did not have enough students and as such we had to discontinue it,” said the principal of the Vel’s School, Ramya Ramanan. Meanwhile, some schools are looking at newer combinations of traditional courses. For instance, Economics has been coupled with Maths, Science and Physics, or Business Management has been offered instead of Maths in the Commerce course. Traditionally, students have been inclined to take the Maths-Physics-Chemistry with either Biology or Computer Science in the State Board stream, but even here — some offbeat courses like photography, home science and others have had such poor patronage that most schools opt not to take them up, as they will incur expenditure in keeping staff for a course with a smattering of students.