reduce pressure on students, the Central Board of Secondary Education (CBSE) has directed all its affiliate schools to discontinue some of the academic and vocational subjects for class IX and XI from the 2018-19 session.

This move comes a few days after Human Resource Development Minister Prakash Javadekar said that his Ministry will reduce the syllabus of NCERT textbooks in the coming two to three years.

“Plenty of information is not education and students are not just a data bank,” he said. CBSE in a letter dated March 9th said that English Communicative (code 101), Information and Communication Technology (code 166) as well as e-Publishing and e-Office (code 354&454) will be discontinued for Class IX students from the upcoming session.

For class XI Dance (code 062), Multimedia and Web Technology (code 067) and English Elective-CBSE (code 101) will no longer be offered to the students from the 2018-19 session. The circular also said that ‘Sanskrit Communicative’ (code 122) will be replaced by ‘Sanskrit’ as prescribed by NCERT and ‘Foundations of Information Technology’ (code 165) has been renamed as ‘Computer Applications’ (code 165).

The decision generated mixed response from teachers and education experts.

“Multimedia was important to the students as it gave them the platform to get into graphic designing later for the professional growth. It was also a good option for those who were not ‘Mathematics-savvy’,” said one of the NCR based school on the condition of anonymity.

Other electives

Meanwhile, agriculture, fashion studies, mass media studies are the academic electives that have been merged with the vocational electives and will be offered as vocational electives in class XI from the upcoming session.

“Mass Media Studies was one of the subjects which helped students with the learning disabilities, however, now they do not have much choice. Also, not everybody wants to study vocational subjects. CBSE should look at introducing some lighter subjects to the students with learning disabilities so that they go through grade 12th,” said Ameeta Mulla Wattal, Principal, Springdales School, Pusa Road.

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