Don’t detain primary students, say experts

<div class="section1"><div class="Normal">MUMBAI: Ashwini’s parents thought her Standard I report card was decent enough—good scores in unit tests and a 46 per cent total in the final examination.<br />But the authorities of the school at Byculla didn’t agree. They felt the child should have scored at least 60 per cent to be eligible for promotion to the next class.<br />Across the city, more and more students are being asked to repeat a year because their performance has not been up to the school authorities’ expectations.<br />This “marking’’ tactics can affect a child’s selfesteem, feel mental-health professionals and educationists.A handful of academicians and parents have, therefore, come together to create awareness among principals about the harmful effect of their decisions to fail children. <br />The Counsellors’ Association of India, an organisation that works with children and youth, met 10 affected families on Saturday and decided to set up a committee comprising parents and principals with the sole purpose of “educating the educators’’. Forget scoring marks, children shouldn’t even be subjected to exams, many counsellors feel.<br />“Our contention is that you cannot say a child has failed in one standard if he or she has an average intelligence quotient,’’ says psychiatrist Dr Harish Shetty, who is also with the Counsellor’s Association. “You cannot hold a child responsible for not performing well.’’<br />While many city schools have been following a policy of not detaining a child in the primary level, there are some school administrators who feel that a child learns more if he\she is forced to repeat a year. It’s a policy that the state government seems to subscribe to. The state has put exams back on board after a study found out that many students who reached Std VI didn’t know how to read or write.<br />“A study conducted last year by Sumit Mullick, the then divisional commissioner of Amravati, found that a majority of the children couldn’t even read. They couldn’t write simple Marathi words or do sums,’’ says school education secretary Jairaj Phatak.<br />“Then we decided that it was better to have exams at the primary level than to have a large illiterate population in Std VI.’’ The government felt teachers would be able to gauge the grasping abilities of their students by holding regular exams.<br />The government was generous enough to say that only those students who scored less than 35 per cent—as the average of all exams held in one year—should be regarded as failed. It also allowed a gracing system for students with poor marks. <br />However, mentalhealth professionals say this is not enough. “If a child is made to repeat one year, his\her self-esteem goes down. Parents also tend to be more punitive with their children,’’ says Dr Shetty.<br />Any decision to fail a student would have to be a well-thoughtout process, says psychiatrist Dr Nirmala Rao.“When a child doesn’t perform well, it’s a signal that there is something wrong..either the child has a learning disability or is going through some emotional problem. We have to focus on all this.’’<br />Instead, many schools— bent on ensuring a perfect score-card, especially during public exams—just use it as an excuse to detain children who score less marks, say parents and mental-health workers.<br />Many even detain children to get back at parents, they claim. “Detaining a child is a harsh thing to do,’’ says Rekha Shahani, member of the managing board of Kamla High School, Khar. “In our school, there are children who don’t perform up to mark, but we give them time and then conduct retests.’’<br /><span style="" font-style:="" italic="">(Names have been changed to protect identities)</span></div> </div>