Life skills in the dry desert of mathematics: Peeping into the textbooks of mathematics

Adolescence is considered as a period of greater vulnerability and pressures. Life skills play an important role in enabling adolescents to cope with the pressures and demands they are struggling with. Family, as an institution of building and inculcating life skills, is getting weak with the time. Therefore, life skill education becomes the responsibility of the school or formal education system. Taking in consideration the criticality of adolescent stage in the life of an individual, National Curriculum Framework (NCF) 2005 has also highlighted the importance of life skill education in school curriculum. All school subjects should promote life skills and values essential for living a better life. Similarly, Mathematics, as a core subject for study at secondary school level, in its content and processes should reflect on and support the acquisition of life skills among adolescent students. Thus, the present paper makes an attempt to analyse the content of the NCERT Mathematics text books of class X^th. The core of the exploration lies in looking at how well the content of the X^th class Mathematics text books manifests the life skills. The results of the exploration indicate that content of the X^th class NCERT Mathematics textbooks is primarily inclined towards critical and creative thinking, problem solving and effective communication while other categories of life skills found relatively little place in the content.