NCERT textbooks are in the news. Again.
Like clockwork, every year, a recurring news story breaks. There have been ‘changes’ to the curriculum. The NCERT (National Council of Educational Research and Training) is in charge of maintaining textbook standards among other things. These are textbooks which are the official syllabus in over 24000 CBSE-affiliated (Central Board of Secondary Education) schools in India.
More importantly, the Common University Entrance Test (CUET) for undergraduate admissions to 200+ universities/institutions is closely aligned to this syllabus, which basically means that except for some super-elite students studying in international-curriculum schools and targeting very premium private liberal arts universities, the NCERT textbooks are essential to securing admission to higher education for a vast majority of Indian youth.
Any changes to this directly affect the intellectual training of millions of students.
The Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) has been routinely accused in the past of ‘saffronising’ the curriculum to incept its political and ideological agenda among the youth. The party and its supporters insist that what they are trying to do is balance the overtly ‘leftist’ leaning perspectives that the pre-existing curriculum had.
These debates, despite the space they take up in social media discourse, are essentially political. As a teacher, I instead look at the pedagogical implications of such interventions.
Official curricula across the world have a very diverse history of revisionist interventions. Postmodernist (and now post-fact) efforts at meaning-making will resist the idea that there is an absolute truth or standard when it comes to what constitutes a good or correct curriculum. Instead, there is more to unpack in terms of what the logic behind any sort of interventionism is.
The current row concerns changes to the political science textbooks at the senior level. There are tweaks concerning the demolition of the Babri Masjid and the 2002 Godhra riots, with both being watered down. The NCERT Director, Dinesh Prasad Saklani, has defended this move by suggesting that the purpose of textbooks is to build “positive citizens” and “not to create violent citizens ... depressed citizens”. It is this justification that I find particularly worrying.
The point of social science inquiry is to create critical-minded individuals and persons who can assess situations with an independent mind and adapt to socio-cultural shifts. It is a training that is becoming increasingly valuable even in the corporate environment, where decades of skill-training focus has created an odd situation. From tech giants to media to FMCG and consumer sector companies, all are walking on eggshells since their consumer-facing interfaces have very little understanding of navigating the choppy cultural waters of this era.
Critical thinking is a function of many components, a vital one being informed historical context. Young students must be exposed to difficult events in society and be informed about multiple perspectives, not just the dominant narratives. Then they must also be trained to work out their own method of ascertaining their personal position with respect to it.
Covering up traumatic chapters of history is the kind of denial-first approach that is totally antithetical to critical thinking. The NCERT director does not operationalise what he means by “positive” and “negative” citizens, but it appears that he mistakes compliance and pliant servility as positivity. It means that the person in charge of such an enormous syllabus is actively against critical thinking.
Another change that has caught the eye with these recent edits to the NCERT textbooks has been the reinterpretation of “vote bank politics” in the context of Indian secularism and electoral processes. The new textbook implies that vote bank politics lead to “further alienation and marginalisation of the minority group.”
Even from the BJP’s lens, this sentence only makes sense if the NCERT operationalises minorities as “Muslims”. Indian democracy has a long history of caste-communal vote bank coalitions such as KHAM (Kshatriya, Harijan, Adivasi and Muslim), AJGAR (Ahir, Jat, Gurjar and Rajput), etc., many of which revitalised Indian democracy through innovative social engineering from the 1970s onwards in particular.
The Scheduled Castes (SCs) and large sections of marginalised caste groups also consolidated behind the Bahujan Samaj Party leading to Mayawati becoming the chief minister of India’s biggest state — Uttar Pradesh — a development that the former Prime Minister PV Narasimha Rao called the “miracle of democracy”.
Even the savarna ‘upper castes’ in large parts of India operate as the BJP’s consolidated vote bank. It is the legacy of these continuous political experiments in India that the multi-party system has developed to be more politically vibrant, representative and inclusive, unlike our South Asian neighbours such as Pakistan, Bangladesh, and Sri Lanka. To write off such a self-evident truth from political science textbooks reeks of bad pedagogy even more than ideologically motivated directives.
In truth, the higher education apparatus in India is currently straining under decades of bad policy decisions. The promotion of elite private universities, while simultaneously underfunding and diluting public universities, has intensified the education apartheid.
The dismal lack of focus on teacher training renders even the best syllabus planning moot, while the reluctance to regulate coaching class mafias has trapped an entire generation in punishment-like entrance-exam preparation servitude, far divorced from any meaningful training that is needed for nation-building or social rejuvenation.
Even as SC, ST (Scheduled Tribes), and OBC (Other Backward Classes) student suicides and dropouts, even in premier public institutions, go unaddressed, this disproportionate focus on NCERT textbooks begs the question — is anyone looking at the picture holistically? The answer is perhaps best understood in NCERT Director Saklani’s rote repetition of enforced ‘positivity’ and industrial-grade denial of the very real contradictions staring at us in the face.
(Ravikant Kisana is a professor of Cultural Studies and his research looks at the intersections of caste with structures of privilege and popular culture. He is available on Twitter/Instagram as 'Buffalo Intellectual'. The views expressed in this article are the author's own and do not reflect or represent his institution. Further, The Quint neither endorses nor is responsible for the author's views.)
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