The Learning Burden- Problem of Curriculum Load

Abstract

Concerns regarding academic burden on students, especially students with special needs and unsatisfactory quality of learning has been talked about time and again. The problem has been discussed extensively by several committees, with several recommendations on reducing the academic burden on the students. But instead, the problem has grown more acute with the passing time and increased competition. This problem of academic burden manifests itself in many ways for our children with special needs, the most common being behaviour problems and sometimes academic under achievement. The situation has become worse over the years even with children both typically developing and with special needs attending pre- schools carrying a bag full of books and notebooks. It is very hard to reconcile the rigorous ‘academic’ regime that is imposed on children with hearing impairment from an early age with the widespread complaint made about moving at the same pace with the typically developing children and competitive ethos of the later school years. The pernicious grip of this false argument manifests itself in strange preschool and primary schools practices like early emphasis on shapely writing, memorizing information and so on. One message of this situation is that both the child and the teacher have lost the ‘joy of learning’. This study aimed at investigating the impact of overload or academic burden of the curriculum on children with hearing impairment and how it affects the psychological well being of these children. The study proposed to develop tool to identify the factors leading to stress in these children with special needs and then correlate with the academic performance and behaviour problems, if any.