It is painful to note that the NCERT document “Draft Learning Outcomes” is posted in the public portal only in English and not in any of the Indian Languages, more particularly not even in a single language listed in the Schedule VIII of the Constitution of India. Only for Language Subjects Hindi and Urdu it is in the respective language.

• How will it be possible for the People of India to discuss and give their suggestions in a foreign language?
• No publicity was given for the present document posted in the MHRD website. How will the People of India know that such a document is posted and comments / suggestions are invited?
• Without ensuring equitable access to learning how can the outcomes alone be expected to be uniform?
• Given the federal structure of the Constitution of India, every State has its own Education Policy and their cannot be uniformity in formulating bench marks for assessing the Learning Outcomes in Elementary Education.

The “Draft Document on Learning Outcomes” largely revisits the exercise on Minimum Levels of Learning carried out by NCERT in the early 1990s. Educationists have for long pointed out that such exercises tend to appropriate the goals of learning and end up goal setting for summary evaluation exercises that ultimately disadvantage children who get left behind in the listed milestones. Every child needs to engage with learning and proceed at a pace that is suited for herself / himself, and it is well known that learning is a non-linear process. Some are quick initially but reach a plateau later, whereas some others start slow but learn fast later on. Specifying learning outcomes in a mechanical manner tends to make schools and teachers insensitive to this critical need and ends up mainly as a means of certifying children as those who can and those who can't (the latter conceding that they can't and dropping out of the system).

In mathematics, the emphasis is entirely on content transaction, layering the syllabus strictly in terms of a narrow measure of complexity. For instance, arithmetic is uniform for the first three years: small numbers and their addition / subtraction in class 1, the same with two digit numbers in class 2, the same with 3-digit numbers in class 3. Multiplication appears in class 3, then 2-digit and 3-digit multiplication in class 4. This is what we mean by a mechanical layering. A child who understands 2-digit subtraction needs no great agility to do 3-digit addition, whereas one who has a problem with face value will be left behind and would only fear 3-digit operations later. This is only an example, to illustrate the problem.

A deeper malaise is that the entire pedagogical processes listed are seen strictly in terms of knowledge and skill, rather than on the "shifting of focus from content to process" envisaged in National Curriculum Framework 2005. Processes like estimation, approximation, visualization, abstraction, representation etc are largely untouched, and thus the mathematical understanding that needs to be established is ignored. 

Overall, this is a very limited exercise, and giving it any centrality in curriculum building will only harm the school education system, and not result in enhancing quality as envisaged. It is apprehended that the document is aiming to ensure that the students failing to attain the bench marks will be certified as academically weak and thrown out of formal school education as stated in the earlier MHRD document “ Some Inputs for draft National Education Policy,2016”

Hence, we humbly request that the document “Draft Learning Outcomes” be released in all Indian languages, at least in all the languages listed in the Schedule VIII of the Constitution of India, and a period of at least 3 months be given to study and submit the response.

P.B.Prince Gajendra Babu

General Secretary, SPCSS-TN