Union Education Minister Pralhad Joshi said Tuesday that rote learning must go as education has become marks-wadi. Speaking at a CBSE event in Dwarka, he said students need hands-on learning to build confidence. He urged schools to focus on real skills, noting, "Learn it properly, not just by-hearting."
At CBSE Experience Centre launch, Union Education Minister says hands-on learning will build confidence and make students job-ready.
Union Education Minister Pralhad Joshi, speaking at a CBSE event Tuesday, called for replacing rote learning with experiential learning, saying the system, and anxious parents with it, has become overly fixated on marks. He was speaking at the inauguration of the experience centre in Central Board of Secondary Education's integrated office complex in Dwarka.
Joshi said much of a student's time now goes into memorising and working out how to score. Parents, too, often feel the marks must come "somehow", he said. Taking a light-hearted dig, he said he often remarks that people have become a different kind of "marks-waadi". The ideology, he clarified, is another matter, but the mindset has taken hold of nearly every parent.
The cost, he argued, is that a child's understanding, learning capacity and interests go unexamined. He also linked the trend to the growing clout of coaching classes. "Learn it properly, not just by-hearting," he said, describing what the centre aims to encourage.
The minister said the pressure to score also leaves students short on confidence, and that the centre could be "a big force" in building it. He said it would make children more curious, encourage them to question, and help them connect learning with life.
Citing a Sanskrit shloka to make the point, he said: knowledge that stays in books and cannot be applied when needed serves little purpose. This, he said, is the thinking behind the National Education Policy (NEP) 2020.
Economy angle
Joshi tied the push to India's economic ambitions. With many countries ageing and short of workers, he said, global demand for Indian talent is rising. He recalled that a German counterpart, in a bilateral meeting, asked India to send "good technicians, good engineers, good drivers". He also pointed to opportunities in semiconductors and AI.
"The 21st century should become the India century," he said, adding that this requires skilling young people and instilling values and a sense of purpose.
He cited 10,000 Atal Tinkering Labs already operating, with 50,000 more planned. He also said startups had grown from about 260 in 2014 to around 2.4 lakh, of which over 140 are unicorns.
The experience centre comes as CBSE, headquartered in Dwarka's Sector 23, pushes what it calls the school-to-work transition. The aim is to link classroom learning with skills and careers, in line with NEP 2020's focus on competency-based education over memorisation.
The effort got a boost in June 2021, when CBSE and the World Bank signed a $2 million grant agreement for the "Facilitating School to Work Transition" project. Among its goals was setting up skill centres in 100 CBSE schools.