The con­tro­ver­sy over ques­tion 35 in this year's SEA ex­am­i­na­tion rais­es se­ri­ous ques­tions about the pri­ma­ry school cur­ricu­lum, the qual­i­ty of de­ci­sions tak­en in our ed­u­ca­tion sys­tem, po­lit­i­cal in­ter­fer­ence and the teach­ing meth­ods be­ing em­ployed in our schools.In the first case, many of us are aware that ra­tio and pro­por­tion has been a top­ic in pri­ma­ry school math­e­mat­ics since the days of col­lege ex­hi­bi­tion.How and when ra­tio was re­moved from the com­ple­men­tary top­ics of pro­por­tion, frac­tions and per­cent­ages in the pri­ma­ry school cur­ricu­lum may be a mys­tery to many, but not to me.

Over the years hap­haz­ard de­ci­sions have emerged from the Min­istry of Ed­u­ca­tion to re­veal a gen­er­al lack of ex­per­tise in ed­u­ca­tion mat­ters.The pri­ma­ry school math­e­mat­ics cur­ricu­lum should pre­pare learn­ers with the skills that are rel­e­vant to their lives, so that stu­dents can man­age the sit­u­a­tions that con­front them in dai­ly liv­ing, such as when mak­ing pur­chas­es, shar­ing mon­ey eq­ui­tably and check­ing the ac­cu­ra­cy of their es­ti­mates.We need a lo­cal team of ex­perts to ar­rest this dumb­ing down of the cur­ricu­lum. It is a damn­ing con­fes­sion for any­one to ad­mit that ra­tio is not men­tioned in the pri­ma­ry math­e­mat­ics cur­ricu­lum at all.

But even so, any stu­dent who was prop­er­ly taught would be able to solve the prob­lem us­ing frac­tion­al parts. But the pub­lic must take note that al­though there have been vast im­prove­ments in teach­ing inthe pri­ma­ry schools, many SEA teach­ers re­ly on news­pa­per pull-outs with drill and prac­tice ques­tions. This tac­tic de­nies the stu­dents very im­por­tant prob­lem-solv­ing ex­pe­ri­ences which would be the main rea­son many stu­dents com­plained about this ques­tion. How­ev­er, I have found that many stu­dents solved the prob­lem be­cause their in­struc­tion was based on au­then­tic learn­ing tasks that re­flect­ed sit­u­a­tions in the re­al world and their teach­ers were not slaves to drills.To ask CXC to ex­clude ques­tion 35 rais­es two very im­por­tant is­sues. First, are we go­ing to dis­crim­i­nate against the high achiev­ers who solved the prob­lem? To do so would con­tra­vene a ba­sic prin­ci­ple of ed­u­ca­tion where suc­cess is re­ward­ed and nev­er pun­ished.

Sec­ond, we note that the Ex­am­i­na­tions De­part­ment of CXC has some of the most high­ly qual­i­fied peo­ple in ed­u­ca­tion and in mea­sure­ment and eval­u­a­tion.

Most of these of­fi­cers hold PhDs and would have un­der­tak­en re­search in ed­u­ca­tion.How could these pro­fes­sion­als be re­quired to ac­cede to the wish­es of a par­tic­u­lar gov­ern­ment min­istry for a par­tic­u­lar ques­tion to be dis­re­gard­ed? Is this not tan­ta­mount to po­lit­i­cal in­ter­fer­ence in the ex­am­i­na­tion process? This is a very dan­ger­ous trend and I am wait­ing to see CXC's re­sponse to this fool­ish re­quest.

David Sub­ran

Ch­agua­nas