The article "Include crafts, family occupations and entrepreneurship as part of school EVS curriculum" by Dr. Lalit kishore published in MeriNews [1] on 19 May, 2015, makes a plea for inclusion of family occupation curriculum as part of contextual EVS and literacy at school level.
Kishore wtires "Though some woman and child rights groups have been opposing the amendments to the Child Labour Prohibition Act proposed by the Central Government that intends not to treat learning of family occupation at home and entrepreneurship by school-age children as child labour, but there are some who wish community skills, crafts and traditional family occupations as a part of school curriculum.
For example, gems cutting and polishing has been the traditional family occupation of thousands of families in the walled city of Jaipur for the last several hundred years, but due to the Right To Education Act; the children of such families are going to government schools wherein the quality of general education is dismally poor depriving them the learning of the family occupation and even hating it as a menial work.
The parents of such children are complaining that neither their children are getting educated properly nor they are learning the family occupation leading them nowhere. They had been requesting the local NGOs to get a course developed in which their children could learn age-grade appropriate 'science and craft of gems' along with the conventional numeracy and literacy skills prescribed by the state government.
Many state governments allow one-third of the course of environmental studies (EVS) to be contextualized as per the local needs keeping the rest of it as common core curriculum, but there is lack of innovations on the part of the schools to include the community skills and traditional family occupation as a part of curriculum.
In an NGO-run ILM School in Jaipur, a gems-centric curriculum has been tried as a part of EVS with micro-learning strategy and use of mini-tools to work with soft materials to acquire mastery over basic skills and scientific knowledge about nine gems or 'navaratnas'.
Even in one of its 21 position papers on National Curriculum Framework-2006, the NCERT has stressed upon the need to incorporate the cultural, social, and creative attributes of craft into the educational system through both theory and practice.
In our country, agriculture, community skills, family occupations and crafts need to be viewed as professional skills leading to better self-employment opportunities. I think that it can be accomplished by integrating heritage and crafts into the study of other subjects and EVS as a part of Indian culture, aesthetics, and economy."
A paper on the related topic was accepted at Indian Science Congress Conference at Vrindavan, Mathura, in 2021.
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