A nation should require all its students to study the same national curriculum until they enter college

The longstanding principle of any education system in the world has been to provide equal and uniform education to all its citizens and the claim that a nation should require all its students to study the same curriculum until college stands to support the principle.

I can attest to the fact that the dream of every student is to be able to receive fair chance and an even playing ground while competing to enter into top universities for collegiate education. A uniform national curriculum until high schools ensures that every student is on the same level and provides this even chance. In many cases, a non-uniform curriculum provides unfair advantages to one sect of students under that curriculum than to the rest of the student body.

There could be a various number of reasons as to why students study under one curriculum than the other. In the case of India, there are primarily two boards of eduations: the Central board and the State board. Most often than not, the schools under the Central board of education happen to be private schools that charge a significant amount of money for its students' education. The State board, however, is the primary board in all government schools that take in students from indigent backgrounds and give them free education. The Central board is considered to be superior to the State board of education as it places emphasis on application of knowledge rather than the route learning method of education in State boards. A significant number of teachers also prefer to go teach at Central board schools due to higher salaries and hence, the students under the State boards have to face an unfair disadvantage.

The recent policy introduced by the Supreme Court in India requires all medical aspirants to take the NEET exam: a competitive, standardised exam that serves as an entrance to all medical schools. The policy faced a lot of backlash due to the fact that students from the Cental board schools had an advantage over the State board school students due to their extensive curriculum. In the short amount of time, the students under the State board had no chance to equip themselves to face the highly competitive NEET exam that covered a lot of unknown topics to them. Hence, to rule out this obvious discrepency that students face, a uniform national curriculum must be introduced.

However, there remains another aspect to this uniform curriculum to be debated. India also has another board of education called the ICSE board. In this board of education, the students are free to choose the subjects they wish to study. This gives them the liberty to learn about the things they truly enjoy rather than having the burden of learning subjects that they do not like. This method of education seems to have a higher rate of success, since each student tailors the education to his/her interests. And this should be the primary aim of education:to customise it to every individual. In the famous words of Einstein: "If you ask a fish to walk, it will forever think it is stupid". These students would also do better when they enter college as they would be better equipped in the fundamentals pertaining to their area of study.

Eduation must be flexible enough to allow its tailoring to every student. However, it should also ensure uniformity and equal access to prohibit any discrepencies and advantages that would be given to only one sect of students.This would completely ensure that every single student in the nation has a fair playing ground to compete to enter college.