CHENNAI: It is the launch year of a pet project of educationists in the state for most classes - the Uniform School Education System - which focuses more on knowledge than memorising, and has textbooks penned by a team of subject experts. In a government school in Porur, however, it seems like the age of memorising and reproducing from guides is not over. Students of the school allege that the school management forced them to buy guides which- published in Madurai and Tirunelveli- were sold on the school premises.“Our school has asked students of higher classes to buy guides which were sold in the school itself. We were told we would not be allowed to write our quarterly exams without buying these guides,” said Shailaja (name changed), a class X student who was forced to shell out Rs 339 for guides for English, Tamil, Social Science and Science subjects. Along with this sum, the student claims she was forced to pay up Rs 30 extra to buy a record notebook.“We were asked to buy these guides ahead of the exams. In the quarterly exam, majority of the questions asked related to those given at the end of all the textbook lessons, but the guides help a lot in answering one-mark questions,” explained the student. The school teachers diligently marked the answers for these textbook exercise questions for the first few chapters. Once the guides came, the students were asked to directly learn the answers given in the guides, the student claimed. The publishers delivered a consignment of guide books,called work books, in the school, which were later distributed to the students by the school management, Shailaja said. The students and parents are suffering in silence over this issue as no receipts have been issued by the school on buying these guides. Guides for Tamil were not delivered in school, and students claim to have bought them from shops. While it is learnt that class IX and X students of the school had to buy guides for four subjects, excluding Maths, students in Class VIII state that they were forced to buy guides only for English and Social Science. Though the guides for Class VIII were issued ahead of the quarterly exams, money had not been collected so far, stated a Class VIII student Kala (name changed). When this reporter visited the school, many students had carried a copy of the guide for the day’s exam (Social Science), instead of the textbook. Most students said the school had made them buy the book, while some said they were themselves eager to buy the guides as it made studying easier.“There is confusion in schools this year because of the paucity of time in completing a new syllabus. At best, the government could have issued a blueprint with questions and leading points to answer them, but any kind of guides will stifle the student’s understanding process, by making it a memorising exercise,” said Prince Gajendra Babu, general secretary of the State Platform for Common School System. Only work books to help students understand: says school A Mala, the school’s HM,said no publishers were allowed to sell their books within the school campus ‘to the best of her knowledge’. When asked if the students were asked to buy guides, she said the management did not ask to buy them any guide, but many students bought it of their own interest. We ask students to buy workbooks for Social Science and English alone, as many students from a poor background would not be able to comprehend the content in textbooks without these guides, which also explained the concepts in Tamil, she said. The work books seem like a euphemism for guides as they have answers to the questions posed in the exercise portion of the school textbooks.
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