Big Picture

Big Picture

Maldivian education system is on a negative trend. Of course there was a well plane curriculum and it has been reviewed recently. The national curriculum comprises all varieties to form a good society. But the question is “Why aren’t we achieving our objectives? “ Are the teachers not aware of the curriculum? No. Teachers are well cognizant of teaching methods and practice. There are plenty of reasons behindhand. 

As a Muslim country the top priority is given to our religion according the National curriculum. But it’s only written on the curriculum. First of all there is no system to assess the practicing part of Islam, which actually is mentioned in key competency. For an example in Islam students learnt about prayers and all but there is no system to give them marks for the practicing part, which actually is performing the prayer. So there are many students who know theory about the prayer and gets “A” grades in Islam but still don’t know how to pray.  As the whole country has fallen to result based learning and teaching system there is much more urgency to produce the results instead of achieving our main objectives. In addition to this teachers are evaluated according to the results they produced in the exams.

On the other hand we have been undertaking an oversea exam. Which also swing our attention to results more.  As we focused more on results the next most important key competency (Thinking Critically & Creatively) is been fading. Since the most effective teaching method, student centered learning, is altering to more teachers centered learning. Schools in all over the country are looking for good results, as that is the only way that they can acquire necessities from higher authorities. Accordingly they encourage teachers to create good results by any mean. As a result teachers are creating all the notes, questions, essays etc. that is harming the students thinking critically and creatively, making them much lazier and uninteresting to subjects.  A well known example can be taken from our own country during 2010, a school have been found guilty of copying during O level exam as all the candidates have written a same answer incorrectly for same question. Ultimately Cambridge University has found out and suspended the school.

In addition to this the government policies play a key part in this issue. First of all governments have crafted the National curriculum. Therefore they themselves are most responsible to facilitate the fellow policies accordingly to accomplish the key competencies in National Curriculum. But the “the Big Picture” is different. Policies are not related and supportive to each other. For example giving awards to schools as well as individuals who got good results in O level as well as in A’ level exams. The so-called “ National Target” is another unreasonable example of this. Aiming for a pass percentage of 65 in 5 subjects highlights the importance of the task not the key competencies.

In conclusion, we cannot accomplish the key competencies in National Curriculum unless we change our policies. Perhaps assembling our own exam is another way we can achieve the key competencies plus different assessment methods would come really practical when it comes to attain the distinctive key competencies in National Curriculum. More over a transformation will not occur in overnight, but a decent modification would be worth waiting for.