Numerous parents, teachers, and health professionals have voiced their concern over increasing weights of school bags for many years. It’s well-established that heavy backpacks are responsible for problems such as chronic back pain and poor posture along with postural musculoskeletal problems in children.
In addition to this, carrying a weighty bag that contains multiple textbooks, notebooks and other materials, every day weighs children down with stress and irritation – it robs children of loving their learning. These guidelines provide a welcome remedy through weight limits based on class levels.
The Jammu and Kashmir administration will have issued these guidelines to cut down school bag weights for children all across government and private schools – and also quite commendable – a much-needed intervention!
These general guidelines are all set to conformity with the NEP (2020), and School Bag Policy(2020) to help alleviate the physical burden from young students for their well-being and to create a better learning environment.
It idealizes demanding weight restrictions as policy. Schools should follow all policies in order to provide structured times in order to limit number of books taken every day.
To relieve some of the burden of carrying textbooks, students prefer to: read: e-books, utilize smart classrooms, or have all notes compiled into a single notebook. The schools should not force the child to carry materials that are not to be used for the lesson that day, in addition to the discussion points.
Education departments should also be inspecting the schools.
In this way, it would believe or assure not only minimizing physical load, but find a correlated representation in the overall change towards a more child-centric educational system.
Under the NEP 2020, the schools must also strive to free the children from meaningless excess, in order to allow them smooth learning processes that are interactive, experiential, and anything resembling stress-free as the policy suggested.
However, its successful implementation also needs cooperation from all stakeholders. The schools must adjust their timetables and take the time to innovate with digital resources. Lessons should be designed by teachers per subject with minimal numbers of text per day. And parents should refrain from overloading their children with extra materials and supplies, once were not stipulated by the school.
