And then, suddenly there are headlines in newspapers (usually in the inside pages), decrying a shocking fabric of lies that is being presented to young, innocent minds as the truth.
The latest outbreak of this pattern is to be seen from Madhya Pradesh. Several BJP legislators have taken exception to a class III textbook in which there is a joke that involves the skin colour of Lord Rama. The joke goes like this -
Ramesh: Mother, Ram was dark wasn’t He? Mother: Yes, son. Ramesh: Then why do we call Him “Hare Ram”?Not a particularly amusing joke for a grown-up; it is also difficult to see anything offensive in it. Nor is it part of the main content of the textbook. It is just a filler at the end of an unrelated chapter, and is probably meant to encourage children to practice the skills of reading. And yet, it held up proceedings in the M.P. legislative assembly for quite a while. The government’s State Council of Educational Research and Training (SCERT) which was responsible for preparing this textbook was strongly censured and its young Director, Rashmi Sharma, in particular was singled out for criticism. Strong words were used against the NGO Eklavya which was one of the foremost among the several organizations that had assisted the SCERT in its work.
This is a puzzling thing to happen. The Director was earlier making a name for herself in education circles in M.P. for her energy and enthusiasm. It was being remarked that here was a rare IAS who was holding grass-roots meetings with teachers and activists to try and devise a new, socially relevant textbook. Eklavya, too, had gained fame as one of India’s foremost NGOs working on educational innovation and reform. Why then this sudden and sharp approbation?
To understand this, perhaps a little refreshing of the memory may be done. There is a pattern to this and if the other instances which fall into this pattern may be identified, the explanation of this pattern would be a little easier to do. And, while looking at the past, it is essential to note the silences as well as the controveries. While it is important to note what was objected to, it is no less important to note what was considered unworthy of being remarked upon.
The largest controversy in recent years was over the history textbooks prepared by BJP governments that had then newly acquired power in UP and MP. In UP the objection was to the references to the Ram Mandir and to the reinterpretation of the Freedom Struggle so as to give heroes of the RSS a place of prominence. In Madhya Pradesh, the history textbooks for undergraduate courses taught that Aryans were natives of India and raised mythology to the level of fact. Those who opposed this were roughly the same confluence of forces that opposed the BJP in electoral politics.
Elsewhere, in Bihar, Goa and Maharashtra, the furore has been largely over the introduction of a new pantheon of heroes into history textbooks. The opposition has been most vocal from political groups that found their own heroes’ hegemony challenged. In 1995, Laloo Prasad Yadav was castigated for having eulogized his own rule and its great achievements. In 1996, the BJP-Shiv Sena ruled Maharashtra government brought out a college textbook which insinuated that Sharad Pawar was the epitome of corruption.
Controversy, then, has centred upon questions that are of interest to powerful groups in society. Religion and national identity are favourite issues. Are we a saffronised nation or a Nehruvian nation that looks upon religion as something to be practised behind closed doors? Do we look upon Gandhi as the symbol of national pride or Hedgewar? Along with this, what raises the hackles of politicians and newspapermen is the aggrandizement or its opposite of leaders commanding allegiance from only some sections of the political arena and opposed by the rest.
What makes an issue contentious is not its intrinsic worth. It does not really matter whether the issue is important or not. What is more important is its relationship with the rhetoric and the ideological rallying points of powerful and articulate groups. There may be many other aspects of a textbook well worth public notice and debate, but only those elements are brought into the limelight that interest such groups. The social and political vision of these groups (in India usually political parties), therefore, plays a decisive role.
That this is a pattern present even in the west may be seen from the longest lasting debate over the school curriculum of the USA. That was (and continues to be) over the question of whether the process of natural evolution is to be taught in the school or the doctrine of divine creation of humanity by God. Powerful groups have kept this dispute alive for close to a century now. On the one side are arrayed the liberal forces of the USA, centred around the university and college system and on the other side are the rich and powerful churches of many Christian sects. The arguments have raged back and forth but there still has been no solution to this debate. In the majority of schools across the American continent the natural process is taught. In a good many schools the divine doctrine is taught. And in a few schools, students are taught both.
The reverse of these controversies gives us profound insights into the process. In India, look at what usually does not make headlines in the papers and what no politician finds deeply disturbing. Our very own NCERT’s civics textbooks for classes 8-10, for instance, have never been challenged by them. Yet, they provide a very unfree, claustrophobic picture of citizenship in India. If they are to be believed, the only active agent in our society is the machinery of the state. The duty of a citizen is only to follow the instructions of government functionaries. Ours is not to reason why. We are expected neither to think, nor to reason, least of all to question. The state is all. The textbooks are full of the functions of various organs of the state, from the President of India to the various government-run welfare schemes. But they ignore altogether the immense role played in society by “private” economic actors or by religious organizations or by the family and kinship. The state is only one of the elements in a complex multipolar mosaic. The NCERT, however, effectively tells students that the state is all that matters.
This is surely a much more dangerous thing to teach in the school than mere histories of what might have happened many years ago. Yet, one never sees the BJP or the Congress or the Left rise up in protest.
Public debate on the curriculum of our schools and colleges is dominated entirely by controversies of interest to political groups of very narrow vision. Hardly anyone looks at the school to comment upon the daily torture that students must endure, or its sheer irrelevance to the life around them.
Under the sway of the same logic, the MP legislators who found a bland filler so offensive, did not stir themselves to look at the quality of the textbook in which that so-called disrespect took place. They made no mention of the fact that this was part of a package called Seekhna-Sikhana that had been field-tested for three years, a rarity in the design of Indian textbooks. Nor were they interested in the fact that this was a rare textbook which emphasized the learning of competencies and skills over mere rote learning. Nor was it important to them that the artificial division of life into geography, language, mathematics, biology, etc. had been rejected to present a composite and realistic learning situation. In short, what they had before them was one of the major advances in the history of Indian textbooks and currucila. In a display more saddening than outrageous, all they were interested in was a stray filler.
How is one to understand all this? It is a complex picture and not easily amenable to analysis. Tentatively, one may propose that in the first place, school textbooks and curricula are not treated by most people in India as something worthy of attention in their own right. Behind this is our general cultural understanding of childhood and children. Children are objects to be loved and cuddled. That is about the limit of their image in the lives of adults. What happens within childrens’ minds, or how they spend the greater part of the day locked up in schools is not considered worthy of debate or controversy.
The school is fundamentally not considered to be a place where one goes to be educated in the broad sense. Any principal who has tried to innovate knows this. Parents insist on their children being given piles of homework and on seeing them undergo all the contortions that result in good marks. The whole point of schooling is good marks and prestigious jobs. Education, the ennobling of the mind, is traditionally the realm of the family and the peer group, not the school. If any poor principal insists on converting the classroom into a place where the students play and enjoy themselves, they can be sure of a great deal of scepticism and opposition on the parts of the parents. Most parents have little interest in the details of school life.
Linked with this is the general belief in the school textbook as being, like Ceasar’s wife, above question. The knowledge that schools give is never questioned. In a remarkable display of the power to command unquestioning obedience, the school is considered to be a place that is above petty political disputes. That is why the intrusion of politics into school textbooks is considered especially shocking by the general public. A common refrain is that it is alright if They carried on their squabbling outside the school, why bring it into the classroom to corrupt these innocent souls. Like the blinkered view of children’s lives, this too is mistaken. There is no question of bringing politics into the classroom, because it was always there. What else is the view of the state as all-powerful, over-powering, other than one partisan view of how society and power works? Ditto for the view that the Congress was the only opposition to the British and the Muslim League was solely responsible for the partition of India, and so on and so forth.
The school has always been at the centre of a complex power-play. The sheer hegemony of this power-play may be seen through its having established in our hearts and minds the myth that school textbooks were nothing but the pure, unadulterated truth. Those that challenge the hegemony, like the student who asks why it is necessary to study the lives of those whom he neither knew, nor was interested in, and in any case who died hundreds of years ago, are quickly and effectively marginalized. Never mind that the student’s question is a practical and a very relevant one and the formulation of an answer to it will force us to reflect carefully upon the role of the school as well as academic disciplines in society.
So far the design of the curriculum and of the school experience has been dominated by people closely associated with universities and by education bureaucrats. For all their noise and fury, the politicians’ direct contribution to schooling has been negligible. Interest in the inner life of the school as well as any discussion on it has been limited to a relatively small and voiceless group of people.
Millions react to the allegation of the image of Lord Ram being sullied in the SCERT’s textbooks. But how many know of the quiet debasement of the image of women in most textbooks? The SCERT in contrast, made it a point to depict girl-children as prominent and confident actors in life, especially in solving maths problems, an activity in which they are traditionally assured that they are less capable.
The SCERT and the many organizations and people who collaborated in the new package of textbooks and teacher-training may be feeling a little low and discouraged right now. Instead of being praised and lionized for one of the greatest initiatives in Indian education, they have been targeted in a grossly superficial attack. But the sheer scale at which their effort was made tilts a little more weight in favour of the widening of the debate on education and schooling. The opposition by the politicians seems to be transient and they will soon find more interesting things to quarrel about. The net effect, it is quite likely, will only be for the better - people will pay a little attention to what happens in the many thousands of hours that their children spend in that place called the school.
Amman Madan Academic Staff College Block III, Old Campus Jawaharlal Nehru University New Delhi 110 067 PH: Off: 6162869, 6174416 Res: 6186108 e-mail: ammanmadan@hotmail.com September 1997