Education has been the topmost priority of every civilized society since the times immemorial. From caves to colonies the world has experiences the contribution of education in development of nations and societies. But the topic under discussion is not all about the development of educational system throughout the world, but about how the educational process becomes result oriented and how do the learners become real life intellectuals. And what makes their foundations strong so that the building of education remains intact. My personal tendency has always been like thinking out of orthodoxy and dogmatisms that still have the imprints on our education system. Despite having the well developed infrastructure and qualified staff why do we, as a system, often fail to achieve the desired results and goals in educating our young generations? In our govt/private education sector students are enrolled in thousands and lakhs, but it very disgusting that still we are far behind achieving the universal goal. The reasons that I consider worth mention are recorded here.

Mere promotion and zero detention policy has further aggravated the situation and only in 10s are educated in real sense and rest of the stock remains as backward as they would have been if not enrolled in schools and colleges at all. As student my experience has been like the stress was laid upon basic literacy and numeracy up to 5th standard. The focal areas used to be Math and Urdu as English was not yet the medium of education in Jammu And Kashmir State. The transition could only be seen in 2000s when certain changes took place in the curriculum and methodology of teaching. B.Ed became the mandatory degree. Unitization came into vogue and stress was given on the coverage of wide area of knowledge at College and University level. But the primary and middle standard still followed the same trend of teaching in an old way of giving notes to students and making them memories those notes. During early years of teaching career I could hardly see any management giving stress on foundational literacy and numeracy. No doubt the students were made to memorize the alphabet (1-26) and numbers (1-100) combined with mathematical tables (1x10 and only up to the table of 10). What was the use of these letters and numbers was never told to the students. The result would be that the students would not become worth creating the words and large numbers on his own. Students were never asked to try their own mind to write down an essay, letter, story etc their own, but only readymade material was served to the students and compelled to memorize that for exam purpose.
FLN is the building block of strong and enduring intellectually structured society. So, let’s understand what dose FLN mean. It technically means that, at primary level, if a student of is able to read and write the text books that are given to him at the primary level. If she/he is able to recognize the alphabet and create words on his own. If he is able to create new words and sentences and comprehend the text, we can surely say that the student is in possession of foundational literacy. While reaching the middle stage he should be able to rearrange the jumbled words into a meaningful sentence. He should be able to arrange the sentences into a meaningful paragraph. For example; Goes/Ram/to every day/ school (Ram goes to school every day.) After reaching Secondary and Senior Secondary level the students must be introduced with phrases, idioms, proverbs and saying that will help them making their speaking and writing skill strong. Introduction to creative writing skills will surely help them to develop a strong writing skill. Writing skills are too much helpful in qualifying higher level descriptive exams.
So for as foundational numeracy is concerned, child should be able to do counting and putting the numbers in ascending and descending order. He should be able to add, subtract, multiply and divide. At middle level he should be able to solve the problems related to four basic operations. He must be able to apply BODMAS in order to simplify the complex operational problems. The problems like [50x60 90-30/10] should come in his range. The problem can be solved as:
[50x60 90-30/10] = 50x60 90-3 = 300 90-3= 390-3=387
The range of such problems can be enhanced from simple to complex with the passage of time. At Secondary level, the children should be given the fist hand exposure to problems reacted to menstruation, trigonometry, arithmetic progression which although are there in the related curriculum, the students are not able to apply them in real life situation and especially during the board exams. The fact is that most of the state/ central level exams ask about these basic concepts and the irony is that students from the same background and with the same qualifications cant crack such exams. Correlating FLN with the higher order learning let me mention here a paradoxical scenario like a 12th pass out candidate can’t crack the competitive exam of same level. And a graduate cant crack the competitive exam of graduation level until they reach the PG level and only them some of them can crack. Obviously it can be called a slow performance and development. The only reason behind it is that the student has been promoted to subsequent grades without little bit consideration to FLN.
To conclude my topic let me put forward some modest proposals to concerned faculty, HOIs and Officers that as a joint venture we should come forward with a new teaching trend that serves the basic objective of creating an intellectually strong student community and only then we can expect intelligent, creative and impactful public servants, officers and employees of the future. This must be treated as a moral and professional duty to work in such a way that is result oriented and objective specific. And I am quite sure that this process will result in homogeneity of intellectual products and the competition will be more perfect and competitive market will look like an economically perfect competitive market. That will further pave the way for curbing the social evils like corruption and nepotism. If we prefer intellectualism over favoritism definitely we shall be able to build a strong nation that no one can defeat. And all the lamenting stories will come to an end along with the accusations.

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