Career centric (Bhutanese Education System)

On 22^nd June, National Council had deliberated length and breadth on several emerging issues in Ministry of Education. I felt relaxed and relieved because at least there is someone who shares same concern of ordinary person like me in the bureaucratic level. I have shared my views on Bhutanese Education System as a “Career Centric System” to incumbent Education Minister during his visit to our school very recently.

My topmost concern in Bhutanese education System is not suddenly about the workload burdens to our teachers and inadequate remuneration to our teachers. Let us keep these issues aside because the interpretation differs from heart to heart. But if someone ignites me to speak on the issues, I will be wordless as I am satisfied with what I am doing and getting.

What bothers me the most is the way we assess our students’ performance in the school. Pen and paper test is the only parameters to measure the performance of our children. No matter how much a student exhibits the quality of good human being, if he or she score less in paper test, then he or she can’t be fitted even in the corner of the society. Only those children with high mental cognition are regarded as god in our education system. A good human being is not always an intelligent person. I believe school is a not place where students only meta-cognition is measured rather school is place where better human beings are produced. But we cannot deny the fundamental fact that reading and writing is important to the face challenges of fast-changing world, but beyond that for me what accounts the most is being a good human with Bhutanese DNA ( Layjumdrey and Thadamsi).

But today in our education system our schools are forced to concentrate more on academic matters. Schools are ranked every year based on academic achievements achieved by the school. And as a result some of the schools even decided to set criteria for new admission solely based on examination marks. After few years there won’t be schools for low achievers. Who says that a low achiever student cannot serve our Tsa-was-sum as that of super achiever?