Punjab Education Minister Daljit Singh Cheema on Saturday emphasised on co-curricular activities for the teaching community to develop holistic education for the children.
In his keynote address during Zonal level Conference on New Education Policy, Cheema said that host of co-curricular activities need to be offered to the teaching community to offer at least one or two such activities for each student. He said that adequate resources should be provided to establish co-curricular clubs in the schools and to deploy teachers having adequate skills to foster such activities adding that NSS and NCC should be made compulsory at certain stages.
The Minister said that life skills, ethical learning, general knowledge should be part of such activities besides ensuring that NCC should be made mandatory in institutions where degree courses or diploma courses in physical education were being offered. “Punjab has already made sports and physical activity a compulsory part of school activity during school hours and we are mulling to introduce compulsory co-curricular activities for fostering creative and other potentialities of the students,” he added.
Describing mother tongue as the best language to impart education, he said that it should solely be the medium to provide education till senior secondary level. However, he said that thrust must be laid on English language as a particular subject so as to enable the students to compete globally.
Appreciating the endeavour of the BJP-led NDA Government to initiate a comprehensive consultative process involving all stakeholders right from the grass root level to frame National Education Policy (NEP) afresh, Cheema said said that with this process, the NEP would be far better than the existing one and usher in quality school education in the country.
laying thrust on need for imparting “Inclusive Education”, Cheema said that the present system of dispersed provisions for differently able children for the formal education system has proved to be inadequate to address the real issue being faced by such students and their parents. He said that a policy of mixed schools with specialised wings should be established where these students would have healthy interaction with normal students with a feeling of self confidence and self-esteem.
Batting for examination reforms in school education, Cheema said that the present system of evaluation exaggerated the marks obtained in the school leaving examinations conducted by various boards. Citing examples he said that it was not understood as how students were scoring 100 out of 100 in subjects like language and Social Studies. He said that the evaluation needs thorough revamping as to give adequate emphasis on various difficulty levels in the question papers.
laying thrust on significant need for upgrading skills of exiting teachers through a robust system of systematic and compulsory in-service training linked to their career progressions, Cheema said that proposed NEP should emphasise the importance of skill upgradtion and motivational training of existing teachers through proper in-service training linked to career progression.
The Punjab Minister said that the teaching hours and teaching days for each subject should be fixed and the holidays for schools should be delinked from Government holidays except for some important national holidays with the flexibility of accommodating local holidays in each region.
The tendency of extending all Government holidays to schools should be avoided as the teaching and the student community avail summer as well as the winter vacations.
He added that special emphasis should be given to recruiting quality teachers for Science, Mathematics and language Teaching with adequate incentive structure and encouraging innovation in improving the methods of imparting teaching in these subjects. The National and State Award schemes should foster completion for innovation in teaching these subjects.