Students must be aware of local history: BOSE Secretary

Srinagar: Aiming to make children aware of the local history and culture, the Board of School Education is contemplating to introduce topics depicting local history, culture and geography in the curriculum. In an Exclusive interview with The Kashmir Magazine, newly appointed Secretary of Board of School Education Dr. Farooq Ahamad Peer said that introducing some chapters of local history like Budshah, Habba Khatoon, Yousf Shah Chek etc in the curriculum was among his top priorities . He said such initiatives would help students know about their own rich culture, history and geography.
“we have seen our students sitting in competitive and civil service exams finding it difficult to reply the questions pertaining to the local history and culture. They know everything about national and international history but lack the knowledge about our history. So my priority would be to introduce some topics related to our culture and history during contextualization.” See Mr. Peer who himself is a distinguished educationists of the state.
“ BOSE has an agreement with NCERT and we have got 100 percent copy right on their material. Once we receive the books, we refer them to a committee in order to review them and they remove the controversial topics- if any- in history or geography books . Now I will try to replace the controversial chapters with topics of local history and culture.”
Mr Peer said that from the current session the question papers for the 11th class exams would be on CBSE format but added that the syllabus would remain the same and there won’t be any changes in the curriculum.
“ We are setting the question papers on CBSE format to help our children compete at national level, but the syllabus would remain same and there is no change in that whatsoever.” Said Peer.
He added that the BOSE would hold many workshops in coming weeks where experts, educationists, School Education administrators, CEOs, Principals and teachers would be invited to seek their suggestions in bringing the improvement in the system. Besides, the workshops, the Board is contemplating to digitalize the system in order to bring transparency.
“ My other priority would be to digitalize the system fully so that there is more efficient and less manual interference. This will save not only our time and human resources but also would save the precious time of the students . This will enable us to declare the- error free results in a shortest possible time.” Said the secretary. He also said that he wants to make everything in the Board ‘online’ to promote the transparency .
Mr. Farooq Peer also wants the infrastructure up gradation and said the –‘infrastructural gap’ has to be narrowed down and the conduct of examination must be exemplary and fair so that the image of the board is more strengthened.
“ with transparent and fair examinations we can produce the best possible human resources so that we have a very intelligent crop of doctors, professors, engineers, educationists in our society.” Said Mr. Peer.
Asked why the BOSE was not cracking whip on Private Schools for not adopting the NCERT curriculum, the Secretary board of School Education said,
“ The 1975 Act passed in the legislative Assembly has given BOSE the mandate to prepare contextual material and under that Act, it is mandatory on all government and Private Schools to adopt that material only . But this is a fact that some Private Schools do not teach those books from 1st to 7th , however, we are not empowered to take action. It is the directorate of School education who can have a call on it and I think they have many a times issued circulars with this regard.” Said the secretary, who admitted that the uniform curriculum was for removing the discrimination among students. He however, added that, “ I will try that all schools follow the same syllabus.”