In our country’s education system, practical journals are handwritten notebooks maintained by students to document laboratory work across subjects such as...
COVER STORY
In our country’s education system, practical journals are handwritten notebooks maintained by students to document laboratory work across subjects such as Physics, Chemistry, Biology, Computer Science and Economics. They typically follow a fixed format: aim, apparatus, method, observation and result, and are assessed primarily on completeness, neatness and adherence to prescribed templates rather than on the quality of experimentation or understanding. In most cases, these journals are compiled by copying experiments and observations from textbooks, guides or seniors, turning what is meant to be practical learning into a largely clerical exercise.
The most ‘practical’ thing about these practical journals is the recycling bin they eventually end up in. They prioritise how work appears on the page over what is actually practised or understood. Students are not learning. They are copying. They copy from the back of the book. They copy from guides. They copy from seniors. They copy because the system quietly demands copying. And then we engage in the fiction of calling this practical education.
Let’s be honest: writing a physics experiment copied from a book does not teach physics. Listing ingredients does not teach cooking. Describing software steps does not teach digital skills. Rewriting economic theories does not teach financial judgement. Copying the properties of acids and bases does not teach safe handling or situational expertise.
This is not learning or skill-building. This is box-ticking as performance art. Students learn one real skill from practical journals: how to look busy without actually learning anything. It teaches you to shine the strawberry while it rots from the underside.
The entire document is less a journal and more a masterpiece of compliance. It masters only one deliverable: following formatting rules, writing neatly and leaving no box unfilled. This is the opposite of practical. It is the high art of simulating work, a performance designed to avoid the risk, the mess and the hard-won understanding of real work.
Consider the classic formality: columns and rows drawn with a ruler, labelled ‘Aim’, ‘Method’, ‘Observation’. And in the ‘Observation’ box, the devastatingly empty verdict: ‘We observed the result.’ No insight. No analysis. Just formatted emptiness, dutifully recorded.
Is that the standard we are assessing? Did philosophers and reformers dream of a system that values optics over understanding? Practically speaking, even jobs don’t ask for journals. Life doesn’t either. No employer will say, ‘Show me your handwritten practical journal,’ ‘Did you draw the margins properly?’ or ‘Did you copy the experiment exactly as written?’
They will ask: can you troubleshoot the malfunction? Can you convert a design into a functional object? Can you cross-apply your skills to a different context? Can you identify early warning signals?
Consequently, the damage is far-reaching. Students leave classrooms with full notebooks and empty abilities. They have ‘completed’ practicals they never actually performed. They have memorised steps they cannot apply. They freeze when instructions are missing. They panic when examples are absent. They perform as hired hands, not thinkers.
And then society acts surprised when graduates cannot function in real jobs. The current journal system prepares students for nothing outside the classroom. If practical education meant anything, the focus would be on action, not documentation. Instead of writing down a physics experiment, students would conduct it, fail, troubleshoot and explain their own results. Instead of copying biological observations, they would investigate, record and interpret real data. Instead of describing software tools, they would build projects that actually work. One approach creates thinkers. The other creates notebook-fillers.
We must replace journal-checking with performance-based assessment. If a student claims to understand electronics, let them design and build a working circuit, not describe one on paper. If they claim digital skills, let them create something functional and usable, not merely list tools and steps. Stop rewarding neat handwriting, perfect margins and obedient replication, and start rewarding competence, problem-solving and adaptability. Real learning is revealed in execution, not imitation, and in doing, not copying.
Marks should follow mastery, not mimicry.
Project-based learning must replace this fake practical culture. This means real-world problems, real outcomes and real accountability. If documentation is required, it should be evidence of work, such as photos, videos, prototypes and reflections, not forty pages of copied explanations.
Another critical reform is making vocational and technical skills mandatory, not ‘optional’ or ‘secondary’. Hands-on skills like carpentry, digital tools, basic electrical work, agriculture and repair should be unavoidable parts of education. These skills should be assessed by industry professionals who understand real-world standards, not just academics who have never applied them outside a lecture hall.
And if documentation is still necessary, let it be meaningful. Replace journals with exit portfolios that show actual evidence of work done. A portfolio of project photos, process proofs and reflections on failure and growth is infinitely more valuable than a volume of copied theory. A portfolio shows effort and learning. A journal only shows compliance.
So let’s stop this self-gratifying illusion that practical journals are practical. They are not. A journal is not practical by virtue of its label. Practicality is measured in applied skill, not aesthetic presentation. It is measured in demonstrable ability, not neatly transcribed theory.
Therefore, value execution over decoration. A filled page is not a filled mind. A copied answer is not a constructed solution. What counts cannot always be counted in margins and checkboxes. It shows up in the work, in the decisions, in the results. That’s where we should be looking.
Yet the greatest paradox is the system’s own final, revealing contradiction: the annihilation of its own demanded decoration. After all that effort - the hours of copying, rewriting and perfecting handwriting, the aching wrists and ink-stained fingers, the drawn margins and filled boxes - the examiner’s only reply is to take a pair of scissors and cut the journal apart, preventing its resubmission the next year. Pages are torn out. Covers discarded. Work forcibly separated from its owner.
What’s worse is that what you spent months building is destroyed in a minute. What was treated as sacred for an entire semester is reduced to scrap in seconds. With a single snip of the scissors, your so-called practical work is stripped of value and sent for recycling, as if it never mattered at all.
Oceans of effort. Mountains of stress. Countless hours of compliance and exhaustion. All the supposed ‘learning’ - gone. Not reviewed, not reflected upon, not preserved. Simply cut away, leaving behind nothing but fatigue and the quiet realisation of how disposable that labour truly was.
That alone reveals the real value of these practical journals. They are not read for insight. They are not preserved as portraits of growth. They are destroyed, which is exactly what one does with something empty. Meanwhile, the student carries the memory of stress and wasted time, and the system reloads the same template for the next batch.
Education must choose: produce pages, or produce capable human beings.
