Reflections on Children Educational Labour
Abstract
In a school, there are multiplicity of courses and learning activities that a school child is going to undertake under a particular curriculum. Subject based curriculum is dominant throughout the world. Generally, a school curriculum contains courses like Languages, Mathematics, Science and Social Studies etc. along with their notebooks and/or workbooks. Besides, students carry out their homework mostly of every subject on daily basis. In addition, in a school assembly, students have to learn prayers, Quranic verses, parts of body, mathematical tables etc. Besides schools, many children go to madrassah (religious school) after school hours. The amount of these activities revealed that students have to tackle excessive academic activities and could be rightly termed as ‘educational labour.’ The investigation is directed to examine the issue of educational labour. It was addressed through qualitative-phenomenological approach. The purposively selected participants were principals and teachers of public and private schools along with six PhD Education scholars. Interviews were employed for collecting respondents’ views. The data were analyzed through establishing codes and themes. The upshots of the inquiry affirmed that students are facing with enormous educational load in the forms of diverse subjects, enormous content, diverse academic practices, homework and frequent classroom tests along with other non-formal trainings. The respondents recommended that there may be reduction, integration or innovation of courses. Likewise, students may maintain either workbooks or notebooks. In addition, there should be no or short and important homework and adequate physical activities.
Keywords: Curriculum, Educational Labour, Subject Based Curriculum, overloaded curriculum, Integrated Curriculum
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