How frequent hartals are hurting schools in Kerala

Hartals in the state have not allowed the state to reach the 200-day mark

sslc-students-file (File) Representational image

For a state with the highest literacy rate, Kerala has failed to stop interruptions in the education of its youth. According to Kerala Federation of CBSE and ICSE schools, there are over 50 lakh students (including the state syllabus students) studying across Kerala whose studies are affected by the hartals in the state every year.

The CBSE board, in the recent years, has tightened the earlier lenient parameters, which stipulated that the schools are supposed to complete 220 working days, with focus on classes 9 and 10. With the state having many limitations in the form of hartals, the recent tightening of rules has caused havoc in the usual way schools work in Kerala. Similarly, The Right to Education Act, 2009, also stipulates a similar period with schools providing 200 working days for class 1 to 5 and 220 for class 6 to 8.

What do hartals do

Hartals have not allowed the state to reach the 200-day mark for the past few years. According to the Kerala Federation of CBSE and ICSE Schools chairman T.P.M. Ibrahim Khan, with close to 90 hartals every year, the schools are only able to reach 190 days while the children need 220 days to have a holistic understanding of the syllabus.

With the laws on one side and the hartals on another, Kerala is not able to give the quality education its literacy rate suggests. The Kerala High Court has told the state government to ensure 220 academic days excluding co-curricular activities and exams.

The schools are helpless as they are not allowed to conduct classes during vacations to make up for the lost days, according to the Kerala State Commission for Protection of Child Rights, the Kerala State Human Rights Commission and the Directorate of Public Instruction. The child rights commission has, in fact, given a directive to schools not to conduct classes for class I to V on Saturdays.

Exception to politics

Kerala Federation of CBSE and ICSE schools has recently made a demand in the light of the coming academic year that the schools should be exempted from normal practices by the political parties and should be able to operate even on days when the shutdown is in effect. This comes at a time when there is a growing fear among the educational institutions whether their students will be able to compete with students from other states when writing all India exams.

Khan said that the standard of government schools have gone down in Kerala—last year, of the 76,000 students who appeared for NEET from government schools, only 5,000 qualified, while 16,000 CBSE/ICSE students wrote the exam, of which 15,000 qualified.

According to him, the effect of hartals is not limited to a district alone. It affects the overall education received by all the students in the state. In response to the time the schools have lost, the federation led by Khan is going to petition for an exemption for Kerala when coming to the law regarding how classes cannot be held during vacation, so that the schools can make up for the lost time.

The crisis that the schools face is that there is no safety for the students when travelling to school, resulting in the children staying back at home. The federation has decided to meet the political parties in Kerala and request that there be exemption for schools during hartals while also requesting that the state government provide adequate protection for the schools during the hartal. The federation had declared that during the two-day hartal, schools can run at their own risk.

When talking about introducing modern technologies into the schools' education system to bypass hurdles such as hartals, Khan stated that only 10 per cent of all the schools in Kerala have funds to introduce such methods while the other 90 per cent do not have adequate funding.

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