At this time every year, the entire country is gripped with examination fever. People are so obsessed with end of year tests and examinations that the topic dominates discussions everywhere for weeks.
Do people expect the Ministry of Education to announce publicly that it has canceled the annual exercise and that from now on, students will move automatically to the next level without the bother of tests and examinations?
In a recent radio program dealing with the matter, almost all students and parents who called in were unanimous in using the expression “plight” to describe the situation even though a ministry official insisted the entire process is no more than a testing of students’ knowledge.
Over the coming weeks the ministry will remain the favorite topic of discussion on the part of the public and the press. This will be the case from the end of the exams for several weeks until the announcement of results.
Throughout the period, everyone will blame the ministry and hold the minister personally responsible for what they see as an ambiguity in the second question in the mathematics paper or for the physics paper containing a question that all allege was outside the curriculum and hence never taught. Parents will forget their own responsibilities and blame what they see as shortcomings and mistakes on officials in the ministry.
Where have those parents been from the beginning of the academic year until the start of examinations? Have they been keeping up with their children’s work and assignments? How many of them have visited the school where their children study? How many of them even know what class their children are in?
There are many parents who have no idea where their children go or what they do in the evenings. And yet, these same parents blame the minister and his staff for all their children’s academic problems.
Nowadays our children are undergoing tests far more difficult than the annual school exams. How have they ended up in this situation and who is to blame? It is not as easy as blaming the ministry alone for the problems.
The social pressures our children are under coupled with the sheer number of school subjects and their quality have combined to turn the children into memorizers who simply learn by heart. Our children enter the exam halls backed by the blessings and prayers of the very individuals who continue to oppose and warn against any reform or modernization of our school curricula. These are the same people who don’t know that, on an average, each student sits for 15 subjects and is forced to memorize some 2,000 pages in less than two weeks.
Looking into the faces of these children as they prepare for their exams, it is not difficult to know who is causing all this misery and who has brought us to this stage.
