Union Education Minister Pralhad Joshi, speaking at a CBSE event Tuesday, called for replacing rote learning with experiential learning, saying the system, and anxious parents with it, has become overly fixated on marks. He was speaking at the inauguration of the experience centre in Central Board of Secondary Education’s integrated office complex in Dwarka.

Joshi said much of a student’s time now goes into memorising and working out how to score. Parents, too, often feel the marks must come “somehow”, he said. Taking a light-hearted dig, he said he often remarks that people have become a different kind of “marks-waadi”. The ideology, he clarified, is another matter, but the mindset has taken hold of nearly every parent.

The cost, he argued, is that a child’s understanding, learning capacity and interests go unexamined. He also linked the trend to the growing clout of coaching classes.…