By Toki Blah
The 2025 Meghalaya Board of School Education (MBOSE) SSLC (Class 10) results were announced on April 5, 2025. The overall pass percentage for the state was 87.10%, an astounding leap from the previous year’s pass percentage of 55.80%. Of 63,682 students who appeared for the exam, 55,473 passed. Fantastic results or to be more specific an incredible achievement in the pass percentage as compared to the previous five years which had average pass percentage of not more than 50%. The MBOSE, supposedly staffed with the creme de la creme of knowledge and learning, must be highly elated with this singular achievement. Now that the euphoria, celebrations and elation over the results are over, let us bestow all those who made it with our best wishes, not forgetting to congratulate their proud parents.
However, humans will be humans and doubting Thomas’s always exist. In this case, I am afraid to admit that I am one of them. I believe it’s time to do a bit of digging into this 21st Century MBOSE miracle. What else can it be called if not a miracle taking into consideration that in the Performance Grading Index (PGI) for school education (All India level), Meghalaya consistently ranks at or near the bottom of the list among Indian states and Union Territories. Specifically, in 2021-22, Meghalaya ranked at the bottom, and in the 2020-21 PGI, it was second from the bottom. Now out of the dismal depths of an educational collapse, we suddenly surface with a 31.3 % improvement in pass averages. Either MBOSE has stumbled across a secret educational formula or a Fairy God Mother must have waved a magic wand for this marvel to happen. If so, the pertinent question is why; for whose benefit and with what purpose did this divine intervention happen? Will Meghalaya benefit or suffer from it? Lets try and find out for we might uncover some very interesting facts.
But first things first. Let us first try and define what is education and what are its purposes. In the modern world that we live in, Education is defined and accepted as an infrastructure or a major system on which society is built and founded upon. Its exceptional importance is not what it delivers today but in its ability and power to sculpt and produce future citizens who will uphold the ideal standards for a civilized society of tomorrow. Education is a complex process. It requires time, patience, a missionary calling from those who teach, plus a bit of facilitation from those who rule or govern. Secondly, within the modern understanding of education, especially in an era overflowing with superfluous information, what to teach ( the curriculum , the detailed plan of what is to be taught, the pedagogy itself ) and outlining what students ought to learn and how they should learn, it assumes an importance that requires no clarification. Here is where strong, down to earth support and sustenance from the Government plays a decisive role.
Thirdly Education requires scholars ( students, pupils, learners called by whatever name) who are willing and ready to be taught. It should involve persons ( students and parents alike ) who realize that learning and knowledge go way beyond securing a paper certificate or a government job. This is crucial for Meghalaya to understand. An Educational Certificate is so often taken as the passport to a ten to five government job and look where this defective belief has landed us! Education should be understood for what it really is. It’s the potter’s wheel upon which the child is shaped and structured towards becoming a desirable citizen of a civilized society. An educated person is one who is imbued with intelligence for social responsibility and acumen for public duty. Getting a government job is not the end all and be all of education. Once this is understood and practiced we can proudly claim that quality education has been achieved!
Today in Meghalaya, the government of the day is experimenting with an educational intervention called the CM IMPACT guide book, which it proudly proclaims is solely responsible for that incredible jump in the pass percentage of its school students. With this proud proclamation of the MDA Government comes the corollary as to whether this action of the Education Department helps meet the purpose and objectives of education or not? This question needs to be asked and who best to answer it but the stakeholders of Education themselves. So lets ask the main stakeholders, the teachers of schools affiliated with MBOSE. 99.9% of teachers asked replied with a resounding “NO”! They feel that this particular action of the Govt aims only at increasing pass percentage while ignoring the real aspects that configure education. They have no complaints against help books per se which are available in all book stalls. If however 70% to 80 % of SSLC MBOSE questions are directly ‘cut and pasted’ from the CM Impact guidebook itself then they feel that their presence as teachers; their commitment to their profession and the love they have for teaching is being undervalued. They feel irrelevant, unwanted, abused and superfluous as the need to imbibe students with knowledge and learning has obviously been overtaken by the government’s obsession for high percentage pass. They feel that in this obsession for a high percentage pass, the value of merit has been ignored, thereby depriving the student the respect for competition and hard work, habits the student will sorely need as he progresses up the academic ladder.
The impression gathered is that teachers of MBOSE affiliated schools are a dispirited and depressed lot. They care and are concerned for the future of their students but believe that the Education Department is simply out to burnish its image through artificially inflated pass percentages. This is a dangerous state of affairs to happen in a Department in whose hands the future of our children is being placed. The need therefore for the Government to climb off its high horse and review its take on school education cannot be over-emphasized. Meghalaya education needs a leg-up, not sneering patronising. Please shed political ego before its too late.
Other main stakeholders in education are the students themselves and their parents. This section of stakeholders have a mixed reaction to the outcome from the CM’s Guide Book. Some are pleased that they managed to cross over to Class XI. Others happy that their wards and children at last possess a School Leaving Certificate. However silence or a muttered, “God will help” are the answers to questions as to how they expect to manage in Class XI where comfort in the form of government help-books do not exist. Its pathetic as they seem least prepared as to what the future holds for the morrow. Then there are the serious students and their equally serious parents who resent this injustice to all the hard work they have put in and the merit they feel they deserve. They feel betrayed by this MBOSE CM Impact Guide Book since they believe it destroys creative thinking and the aptitude to solve problems while simultaneously killing all efforts at creativity and exploration of new ideas in the child’s mind. They bitterly object to what they see as an arbitrary government shifting of educational goalposts from those of learning and knowledge to one that seeks praise from the ability to score high pass percentages through unfair means. They see only self goals being scored in such dim-witted initiatives. Maybe their criticism is not far from the mark.
As citizens of Meghalaya we have to ask ourselves these questions as they pertain to the viability of an infrastructure that helps classify Meghalaya as a dumb or a smart state but most importantly because it impinges on the prospects of our future generations – our children! Be that as it may, at this juncture one is baffled by the silence of hordes of retired officers and so called experts who had served in the Education Department. Do they have nothing to comment on these developments or do they believe that because they are retired their brains too have stopped working? Its sad to see the investments made on such people and the experience they gained during their service life, go to waste!
To conclude, we as Hill people demanded our political Right to be a State and in 1972, we got Meghalaya. Together with this political Right we also feel we have the Right to development. By development we probably meant improvement of the economy where infrastructure perks up; job opportunities start opening up; the demand for skill, experience and expertise comes into play and prospects in wealth-creation becoming plentiful. These expectations are real and genuine and there is nothing wrong with such dreams. The sad fact however remains that the political leadership of Meghalaya in the last 50 years forgot or neglected to prepare its people towards this dream.
A skilled and educated workforce is essential for economic growth. For this to happen we needed a merit based education system where competition and struggle form the mainstay of academics. Such a merit based pedagogy where competition of local tribals with non-tribals was encouraged in academics pre-Meghalaya’s statehood existed pre-1972 and was perhaps the main reason for an unbroken inflow of local tribals into the All India Services). That generation produced some of the best politicians, administrators, teachers and educationists of our times. Merit then was the yardstick. Unfortunately jingoistic politics then stepped in and Meghalaya slowly became mired in reservation based performance. That’s when the slide downhill began. Tragedy is we still continue to play with our education system and the future of our children.
But enough is enough. Those directly involved in education, teachers and their associations; bodies of parents with school going children; pressure groups like the KSU, GSU and JSU must now decide. Can we still allow political one-up-man-ship to take control of our children’s future or do we as stakeholders demand a more commonsense, rational, coherent and futuristic educational approach for Meghalaya? The time to take a stand on this vital issue is now. Are we up to it?