‘Choice’ and ‘flexibility’ have develop into the brand new buzzwords in instructional reforms and coverage paperwork. Across the nation, educators are focusing — greater than ever earlier than — on catering to the person wants and aspirations of scholars. The conventional one-measurement-suits-all mannequin is giving option to an strategy that values the variety of pupil aptitudes and pursuits.
The new paradigm encourages a number of pathways, permitting college students to pursue mixtures of programs and careers that align with their passions and potential. A science main can now minor in music, as an illustration — a shift symbolic of the transfer from instructor-centric to learner-centric education. The focus has expanded past disciplinary boundaries, embracing multi-disciplinary and even transdisciplinary approaches. The rationale is evident: studying confined to a single self-discipline dangers isolating college students from associated fields, whereas cross-disciplinary research presents a bigger and fuller perspective of the world.
However, when such beliefs are imposed upon a inflexible tutorial framework like ours, the selection provided is Hobson’s selection — selection in identify solely. Teacher workload, typical pedagogy, poor pupil to instructor ratios, and outdated analysis methods conspire to cut back flexibility to a mere paper promise.
The phantasm of selection
The introduction of the Choice-Based Credit and Semester System (CBCSS) in Kerala in 2009 was heralded as a landmark reform meant to supply college students extra freedom. In concept, credit had been to mirror weekly educating hours. In observe, the system accommodated anomalies: a 4-credit score course may run for 5 hours every week, whereas a two-credit score course would possibly require simply 4 hours. Such inconsistencies had been quietly ignored to take care of the phantasm of freedom. Moreover, the so-referred to as buffet of selections had been hardly selections in the true sense. Beyond a set of obligatory core programs, college students had been provided a restricted choice of ‘electives’, usually chosen by the departments themselves. The a lot-marketed “open course” — a two-credit score paper within the fifth semester provided to college students of different departments — was the one semblance of selection. Thus, regardless of the rhetoric, real tutorial freedom remained a distant dream.
The similar rhetoric of flexibility as soon as once more took centre stage, with the launch of the Four-Year Undergraduate Programme (FYUGP) in Kerala in 2024, as mandated by the National Education Policy, 2020. The new construction allowed college students to modify majors and minors, theoretically enhancing autonomy. Yet, in contrast to earlier curriculum modifications, this reform demanded deep structural modifications, making it extremely difficult. The conventional concept of lecturers delivering lectures in mounted lecture rooms gave option to college students transferring throughout departments in quest of appropriate programs and lecturers.
It goes with out saying that structural modifications pose insurmountable challenges. A living proof was a clause within the college rules of Kerala prohibiting college students from selecting minors from allied disciplines. While it was supposed to advertise interdisciplinary studying, it inadvertently hindered specialisation.
Disciplines like Commerce and Functional English, which had beforehand allowed aligned minors, discovered this rule counterproductive — a restriction masquerading as selection.
Need for systemic modifications
For any reform to succeed, systemic modifications are important. During the writer’s tenure as Chairperson of the Board of Studies in English on the University of Calicut in 2017, two key improvements had been launched.
The first was a talent-oriented query paper for the course on Communication Skills. The conventional format, full of essay questions on theories and fashions, failed to check precise communication capability. It was changed with a purely exercise-primarily based paper designed to evaluate actual expertise. Yet even this variation bumped into bureaucratic hurdles: permission for an accompanying reply booklet was denied on “confidentiality” grounds, forcing evaluators to flip endlessly between query papers (which carried greater than twice the variety of questions of its earlier counterpart) and reply sheets.
The second innovation was a course titled ‘Introducing Literature’ — a arms-on, idea-pushed paper designed to show the way to learn literature fairly than merely what to learn. Instead of memorising texts and answering questions on the idea of prescribed texts, college students had been taught literary ideas and had been required to interpret unseen passages from linguistic, aesthetic and political angles. Ironically, this radical step met extra resistance from lecturers than college students, because it demanded a shift from typical strategies to idea-primarily based educating, educating us the dear lesson that instructor preparedness and coaching ought to have been ensured previous to rolling out the reforms.
Facing floor realities
Today, the FYUGP aspires to make undergraduate education extra talent-primarily based, analysis-oriented, and autonomous, with a modest 10% autonomy given to lecturers for framing syllabi whereby every instructor can pitch of their revolutionary concepts. Yet, on the floor stage, lecture rooms and methodology stay largely unchanged. One can solely reap the outcomes if ample instructor coaching is offered, if class sizes are smaller, and if analysis had been to be built-in into educating workloads.
Abida Farooqui is a Senate Member of the University of Calicut, and Professor and Head, P.G and Research Department of English, Govt. Arts & Science College, Kondotty
Published – March 12, 2026 12:24 am IST
