A section of teachers has expressed reservations about the government recently announcing in the Assembly about including moral classes in schools to prevent teacher-student confrontations and improve student behavior.

“The expert committee to form the syllabus for the moral classes course is yet to be constituted. Still, the scheme will work only when the government switches to knowledge-oriented education instead of marks-oriented system,” said TN Vocational Teachers Kazhagam president SN Janardhanan. “However, it is not as if government was totally at sea on the moral classes issue,” he said and added that “the Centre provided an NCERT based 72 guidelines on this issue.” However, “the guidelines provided mainly to school heads were never used due to the fixation on marks,” Janardhanan added. Lamenting that “fixation on marks resulted in teachers lacking the time to provide moral guidance and hence teachers alone cannot be blamed as todays teachers are unable to act against students unruly behavior because of government orders,” said A Srinivasan, Vellore district secretary of the TN Post Graduate Teachers Federation. “A retired DEO L Sadagopan conducts classes for school heads and teachers annually on how to improve values among students in Vellore,” Janardhanan said. Sadogopan told DT Next that “I along with some retired officials have for the last 15 years conducted value education classes for students on a voluntary basis.” A section of teachers were happy that the government had at-least made a start on this issue.