A teacher sits after school with an open register. Its columns carry the names of her 30 students; its rows have indicators—participation in group activities, an ability to relate concepts to daily life, on language and math, and more.
The term ended a week ago. Weeks of observation are being noted in a matter of hours.
This is the only practical way, since filling 65 indicators for 30 children every week is impossible. Which is what Continuous Comprehensive Evaluation (CCE) expected of every teacher.
And CCE is the fourth classroom orthodoxy in a series that demands our scrutiny. ‘Constructivism’ and a ‘whole language’ approach shaped teaching; ‘joyful learning’ without any burden, described in my last column, was the substratum for those. CCE grew straight out of it.
If any burden on a child is the enemy, assessment is its most visible instrument; once learning without a burden became our moral ground, examinations had no room. CCE took their place; ‘no detention’—not holding a child back to repeat a year—followed.
Let me begin with what is undoubtedly true. As a principle, CCE is fundamental to effective teaching. A teacher teaches something. She finds out what her children have understood and decides what to do next on that basis. Put like that, what else would a teacher do? But our schools did, and do, something else.
A lesson is taught, exercises are set and the syllabus moves on. Assessment arrives at the end to judge the child rather than help the teacher and learning. ‘Continuous’ enabled that feedback loop. ‘Comprehensive’ broke the belief that learning is visible only through tests and is only memorization.
The case against detention is equally strong. There is almost no evidence that repeating a year improves learning and much on how ‘failing’ a child can hurt the child’s development. So, when the Right to Education (RTE) Act of 2009 made CCE compulsory and abolished exams and detention up to class 8, it seemed right to many, including me. We have all seen the tyranny of exams and what failure does to a child.
But this is a story of how an insight turns into dogma once a kernel of truth is allowed to metastasize. Consider what we asked of a teacher with 20-30 pupils, often across more than one grade in the same room, and more than one subject: record each child’s progress, continuously and comprehensively, across several domains and parameters, and individualize your teaching accordingly.
Even the finest teachers could not do it. Everyone, including the ‘system’, understood this within a year. A settlement was quietly reached: registers would be filled, boxes ticked and nobody would ask what it all meant.
So we arrived at the worst of all worlds. Neither exams nor CCE happened. There was no detention even if the learning was grossly inadequate. Children moved up every year and nobody—not the teacher, not the parent, not the child, nor the ‘system’— had any account of what was learnt.
That school education did not collapse into chaos is strong evidence of the professional integrity of the average teacher. She had every incentive and leeway to stop teaching seriously. Most did not.
But integrity cannot substitute for a breakdown of one of education’s fundamental processes. Children reached class 9, where examinations resumed and detention returned, and began to fail at age 15 with the board year ahead and no time to cover lost ground. We had merely deferred detention, concentrated it and made it far worse.
The privileged, as always, escaped. Their schools found ways to assess students—via worksheets, class tests and activity records—and keep parents informed. Behind that stood the home: a grandmother who read with the child, say, or a tutor. The underprivileged had no back-up.
This is the pattern in every column of this series. An orthodoxy about schooling is a luxury that only those with a second system—the home and its networks—can afford to have imposed on their children.
For 10 years, this was a charade that educators knew. Then some states began asking for exams in classes 3, 5 and 8, only to be attacked as regressive by those furthest from any classroom. Parents who could see that their own children could not read wanted testing. Parliament amended the RTE law in 2019, restoring states’ power to examine and hold back, with re-examination after two months of extra instruction. The rules came only at the end of 2024.
The choice was never between assessing a child and protecting her. The National Curricular Framework of 2023 describes what we should have built at the start; the 2024 rules draw on it. Enable CCE within classroom processes, but do not mechanize it. Alongside, assess through formal exams, external where needed, at classes 3, 5 and 8. If a child has not learnt, oblige the school to teach her again.
The orthodoxy asked us to believe. It did not ask us to see what was actually happening, or what was possible, or do the hard work of balancing principles within a frame of reality. We must never let an abstract idea rule over reality and experience.
A generation was schooled while we protected an abstraction from what was plainly visible in every classroom. The idea suffered no loss but millions of children are still paying for it.
The author is CEO of Azim Premji Foundation.