DESIGN: MOHSIN ALAM
A copy of the book, which The Express Tribune managed to get hold of around the same time it was printed, showed that students in 2019 were still expected to learn about MS DOS, Windows 98, CD ROMs and floppy disks - things all but a few of them would never even have seen in person, much less used.
When The Express Tribune reached out to Sindh’s educational authorities at the time, representatives naturally pointed fingers at an outdated curriculum that could only be revised incrementally class by class. The director of the Sindh Bureau of Curriculum, however, did state the Class 9 syllabus, last revised in 2002, would be next in line.
Understandably, a lot of hope was pinned on the new curriculum for Class 9, work on which was supposed to have taken place in May-June, 2019. But although the Sindh education authorities have revised the scheme of studies for the matriculation level and have brought the course more in line with modern requirements, they have curiously decided to stick to the same outdated textbook.
The students of classes 9 and 10, as such, are going to be stuck learning about floppy disks and Windows 98 in 2020 and beyond.
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The development came to light when the Board of Secondary Education Karachi (BSEK) chairman Prof Saeeduddin complained about the matter to former school education secretary Ahsan Mangi. In a letter, Prof Saeeduddin urged the latter to ask the relevant department to explain why they had decided to retain last year’s textbook after updating the Computer Science curriculum.
The new curriculum, which is now available online, incorporates topics like computer security, networks and automation for Class 9 and programming techniques, input-output handling, control and loop structures, computer logic and logic gates, and the World Wide Web for Class 10. The curriculum also prescribes lab lessons for Class 10 students focusing on algorithms and programming languages like C, C++, Visual Basic, Java and HTML.
Even so, Prof Saeeduddin, in his letter, pointed out that seven chapters from last year’s book had been prescribed for Class 9 and three chapters for Class 10 in the new scheme of studies.
When The Express Tribune reached out to the Directorate of Curriculum Assessment and Research Sindh (DCARS), a subsidiary of the province’s school education department, officials on condition of anonymity said that the new Computer Science curriculum was prepared in line with the 2009 and 2016 versions of the National Curriculum. They admitted, however, that even the new curriculum was suspect given how any course pertaining to technology must be revised on a yearly basis.
Although no longer as ancient as last year’s book, the new curriculum still does not incorporate topics like mobile applications and cloud computing, something which users around the world are becoming more and more reliant upon.
Published in The Express Tribune, February 21st, 2020.
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