Sibal defends scrapping of class 10 boards

Updated on: Monday, February 01, 2010

New Delhi: Kapil Sibal, the Union HRD minister justified scrapping of Class 10 board examinations, stating that government is trying to conceive a comprehensive evaluation system.

"To ascertain the performance of the child, he or she must go through a continuous process, spread the horizon of knowledge and move beyond text books," he said here after inaugurating the 19th World Book Fair at the Pragati Maidan here.

The minister was replying to a question posed by his former teacher and historian Irfan Habib that he could not understand why the Class 10 board examination was done away with.

Sibal said, "As a boy, I was brought up on the knowledge found not in text books but far beyond it - to allow continuous discourse to take place in my mind."

"Knowledge is a form of communication and a child must absorb it and challenge it. And books are a form of understanding that plethora of knowledge."

The senior government leader said that, "Whenever we talk of universities, we talk about engineering colleges, medical colleges and science universities".

"But what India really needs is the world class liberal art university, which has nothing to do with science, but focuses on social sciences, developmental economics, English literature, History and contemporary issues that confront the country," he added.

Sibal defends scrapping of class 10 boards

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