site.bta"School Curricula Are Overloaded", Education Minister Says

"School curricula are overloaded," caretaker Bulgarian Education and Science Minister Galin Tsokov said here on Monday at an Annual Meeting of the Professional Directors Community for Intercultural Education.

"Overloaded school curricula demotivate pupils and do not address their individual interests and capabilities, and this is one of the challenges to quality education," Tsokov pointed out. He added, though, that in any educational system school curricula and learning content cannot be changed at one go. This is evidenced that commissions have been discussing the matter for two years and the experts failed to reach agreement on what to drop and what to add," the Education Minister said.

"Two ministers before me did not greenlight the changes in the learning content," Tsokov said, adding: "You can see how complicated this process is, we shifted the focus, and this was written in the government programme."

In his opinion, school curricula must rather set the framework and focus on competences instead of on providing and reproducing knowledge. "The focus on competences will largely relieve curricula of superfluous content," Tsokov argued. 

The second key point is to increase the comprehensive nature of knowledge and to develop pupils' skills. Thirdly - and very importantly - is making school curricula more adaptive to the specific local school conditions, the Education Minister explained.