Schools Around The World

The topic of the Student Blogging challenge’s week 6 is Schools around the world.

Now, the world is a huge place. So I don’t think it’s possible to make the post interesting if I go ahead and list all the different types of them. Neither would it be any help.

So, I’d rather share with you something about the educational boards in my country, two to be precise: CBSE and IB. And maybe even impart some of my knowledge about them because I just changed by educational board for grade 11 and 12.

P.S. There are other educational boards available too including ICSE and IGCSE and other State boards. But in this post I’m going to focus primarily on IB and CBSE.

Okay, so, here’s the thing:

When you pass 10^th grade in India from the mainstream board (Central Board of Secondary Education – CBSE), you’re expected to make a choice.

And if I were to be honest, I don’t like either of the three options.

The choice is to decide which stream of study you’d like to go ahead and study for the last two years of school and mostly university as well.

The idea comes from the fact that if a person devotes his main focus to a particular stream of study, he/she is more likely to succeed in that instead of having to multi-task in multiple streams and fail to succeed in any of them.  

Now, if any ordinary person was to make this choice, he/she would obviously do it based off his or her interests, isn’t it?

Except, that’s not always the case in here. Hear it from an insider, being in the system, it’s barely ever the case.

But hey, what even are the choices?

There are three streams of study to choose from:

The Sciences- physics, chemistry, biology/math.

Commerce – Business studies, accountancy, economics.  

Humanities – History, psychology, economics, political sciences, geography (Any 2/3 depending on subjects offered by schools)

There may be a difference in subject choices for optional subjects which differs from school to school.

Here comes the loophole:

It’s a popular societal belief that the sciences, especially the combination of physics, chemistry and math is considered a “safe choice”.

Also, that streams like commerce and humanities are comparatively regarded inferior to the sciences because it implies the people pursuing arts and business interests are doing an easier job than the ones studying the sciences.

Now, for anyone who comes from a more open-minded society would consider it silly.

Duh, it is! I know right!

Apparently, it’s still how things work here.

Despite the fact that a person might be incapable to pursue science and do well in it, he/she is made to choose it still because it’s the “safer option.”

Now, where does my experience fit into the picture?

Well, I wrote my 10^th grade final exams in March 2020. Which means, I had to make a choice too.

And, as I specified earlier, I don’t like either of the choices. In fact, I found the entire stream-system a little limiting in terms of a person having varied interests concerning various unrelated fields.

I am interested in history and physics. And there’s no possible way for me to explore both of those subjects under the system.

So, if I were to continue in the system, I’d have to give up on one of the two areas of interest.

Here’s what I did instead:

Unwilling to compromise on either, and finding out about something called the International Baccalaureate Diploma Programme at the exact right time, I changed education boards.

I’m aware of the Advanced Placements and A-levels but they’re not prevalent in my country. In fact, the city I live in has only one school offering the IBDP.

Naturally, the fact that this thing not being the mainstream in my country, much less the city, invited lots and lots of contradictions.

But, the end result was me choosing the minor board because it was able to offer me more than what I was getting from the mainstream board. I now study a diverse selection of subjects including physics, economics, English literature and business management.

Another noteworthy fact: In my opinion at least, CBSE emphasized so much on rote learning and writing exams that it lost the essence of actual teaching. Since 8^th grade, me, along with most of my classmates had to go to extra classes called ‘tution classes.’ And it made us so dependent on them because in reality, we weren’t really learning anything much in school. It made the concept of not quite understanding the concept yet writing exams shockingly normal.

I was sick of that too.

So in my experience, the IB board, which happens to be preferred more internationally suited my requirements better than the mainstream board in my country.

And, it’s been only three weeks of attending school under this new system but based off what I’ve done in all this time, it sounds like a good idea to be spending the next two academic years, which also happen to be the last two years of schooling for me.