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Education: NCERT Textbooks
Editorial, Economic and Political Weekly
August 26, 2006
The proposed textbook on political science for class XII, yet to be
released by the National Council for Education Research and Training
(NCERT), has predictably set off a storm. The textbook will cover
entirely new ground by including events that have shaped
post-independence Indian history and will be available for students
from the academic year 2007-08. However, political parties across
the spectrum, burdened by their "past", have already termed the
contents "objection-able", and have now forced the UPA government into
prom-ising an inquiry. Many of the events that will be referred to
– the Emergency, the anti-Sikh riots, the Babri masjid
demo-lition and the Gujarat riots -- make up the book's last section
entitled, 'Recent Issues and Challenges'. This, in turn, follows other
sections that seek to give a cogent, theme-based tra-jectory of how
democracy in India has evolved in the post-independence period. Hence,
the course appropriately begins with the Congress' dominance of
national level politics and the various issues involved with
nation-building; it then moves on to the period of the 1970s, which saw
a crisis of the constitutional order and the rise of regionalism.
Events of the 1980s and later are also covered in the sections on
social movements and the dawn of coalition politics.
The NCERT committee drafting the syllabus was guided by the greater
pedagogical issue of "empowering" students, to foster a sense of
inquiry, to enable them to analyse critically, so as to eventually
become informed citizens in their own right. Political science for high
school students has remained an abstract, moralising course on civics
and this was the first time that contemporary history has found its due
place in the syllabus. It was a necessary, much desired move, for
students of politics appeared more familiar with the events of 1920s
and 1930s than with the latter decades. Moreover, by availing of a wide
variety of sources – court pronouncements, different inquiry
reports, reports by the National Human Rights Com-mission, etc -- the
attempt was to give a generalised objective perspective rather than a
personality-based orientation to the subject. This became all the more
critical, for students in a computer literate age are already exposed
to an uncritical, even chaotic mass of information from diverse
sources. The immediate fear by the opposition is that the
orientation of events will reflect the partisan viewpoint of the party
in power. Education, especially the subject of history, and the role of
the NCERT as the organisation largely responsible for shaping content
and pedagogy, has served either as a political handmaiden for the party
in power or as a "whipping boy" for the opposition.
The recent disruption in Parliament over the proposed political science
textbook has been made murkier by attempts to discredit the NCERT's
efforts to evolve, for the first time, a "child-centric" syllabus.
Thus, the old controversy over Bipan Chandra's textbook for class XII,
Modern India (a two-decade old textbook being phased out) has been
raked up again, with the familiar outcry of nationalist leaders being
labelled "terrorists" -- a politically and historically contextualised
term. The recently released Hindi textbook for class XI has also
drawn ire for its allegedly derogatory references to dalits. But the
stories by the celebrated Hindi novelists, Premchand and Om Prakash
Valmiki, help familiarise students with aspects of the caste system
itself and the book comments that the language of the time is no longer
acceptable. Of similar nature is the accusation that the book
encourages terrorism, simply because it includes a poem by the noted
Punjabi poet-writer, Avtaar Singh, 'Paash', which instead decries the
fear terror imposes on the ordinary individual.
For far too long, education has been ideologically divisive; with the
government, of whatever hue, seeking to position itself as the shaper
and repository of all information. But information flows are now too
diverse, too varied and the NCERT, to its credit, attempts to merely
give direction, its objectives being to guide the student to arrive at
her own understanding. The new textbooks for political science for
class IX and those for history in class VI now available online, offer
an innovative approach, by moving from the student's immediate and
personal world to wider and more abstract issues. With an increasingly
young population that is arguably more familiar with immediate
historical events, a new approach towards education has become
necessary. The NCERT's recent moves, by recognising the changing base
of learning and by empowering the student to become an active
participant, are laudable and also timely.