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Texts and Books Popular perception treats the textbook as the prime site for curriculum designing. Though curriculum planning is a much wider process, curriculum reform seldom goes beyond changing the textbook. Improved textbooks that are carefully written and designed, professionally edited and tested, offering not merely factual information but also interactive spaces for children are important. But curricular reform can go much farther if textbooks are accompanied by several other kinds of materials. Subject dictionaries, for instance, can relieve the main textbook from becoming encyclopaedic, burdened by carrying definitions of technical terms, and instead allow the teacher to focus on understanding concepts. The triangular relationship between high-speed classroom teaching, heavy homework and private tuition, which is a major source of stress, can be weakened if textbook writers focus on elaboration of concepts, activities, spaces for wondering about problems, exercises encouragin...

HEALTH AND PHYSICAL EDUCATION It is widely acknowledged that health is influenced by biological, social, economic, cultural and political forces. Access to basic needs like food, safe drinking water supply, housing, sanitation and health services influences the health status of a population, and these are reflected through mortality and nutritional indicator s. Health is a critical input for the overall development of the child, and it influences enrolment, retention and school completion rates significantly. This curriculum area adopts a holistic definition of health within which physical education and yoga contribute to the physical, social, emotional and mental development of a child. Undernourishment and communicable diseases are the major health problems faced by the majority of children in India, from the pre-primary to the higher secondary school stages. Therefore, the need to address this aspect at all levels of schooling, with special attention to vulnerable social groups and ...

WORK AND EDUCATION Work, understood simply, is an activity directed toward making or doing something. It also means making one’s work or capabilities, or both, available for someone else’s purposes for monetary or other forms of return. A number of these activities are related to producing food, articles of daily use, looking after the physical and mental well-being of people, and other activities related to the administration and organisation of society. In any society, in addition to these, two basic dimensions (producing goods and establishing smooth functioning), various other activities also contribute to human well-being, and in that sense are considered forms of work. Understood in this sense, work implies a commitment to other members of the society and/or community as one is contributing one’s work and capabilities for fulfilling their needs. Second, it implies that one’s contribution made through work will be submitted to public standards of performance and hence will be valu...