My father was a great wall decorator. If not well-framed prints of landscapes, or an assortment of wall-clocks, he was often putting up posters of fruit bowls, or fuzzy animals, or even maps of the world. It was on one of these maps, many years ago, that I first noticed that the India on it looked a little different from the India in my textbook. The map was a give-away by some foreign shipping company, and to my young eyes it looked like a tiny bit of India had been chopped off the top. Puzzled I asked my dad who told me something about a Line of Control. I was fascinated and wondered why I had never heard of it before.
In 2005 NCERT, the apex Indian body for research in school education, came out with their latest National Curriculum Framework (NCF). As with any policy publication on education, the Framework too was soon mired in political opinion and debate. Both the Left parties and the Saffron brigade vented their ire at assorted components of the framework.
To be just to the NCERT they have tried to iron out issues that have plagued the Indian school education systems for decades. School boards, including the highly rated CBSE, have been widely accused of promoting rote learning and little creativity or individual thinking. The preface to the NCF document is frank in admitting to these and other failures. It bravely confesses that our schools are resistant to change and, while our textbooks have been getting thicker and flabbier, children see little connection between their daily lives and what is fed to them daily in classrooms.
As with many other issues the government has not been entirely blind to the state of affairs. The Ministry of Human Resources appointed the Yashpal Committee in 1993 that produced a widely appreciated report called "Learning without Burden". (This link gives a review of the history syllabus using the guidelines prescriped by the report. Be warned, it is not gripping reading.)
All this is old news to most readers. Even during the recent NCF debate the public reaction to the entire imbroglio was one of apathy. As long as our progeny became engineers, doctors or MBAs no parent seems to care. Grade sheets seem to have become the ultimate representation of a school education. The days spent in the classroom before that merely got in the way of coaching classes. With entrance exams to filter out applicants to most good graduate programmes, school curricula recieves little, if any, attention.
Surely this ambitious NCF-2005 means that the NCERT is aspiring to give our children a better school experience. The TWW decided to probe further: while the NCERT is making a laudable attempt to change the way our children learn, what were they doing about the content? What is the point of experiential and enjoyable learning if the lessons imparted were sub-optimal. The TWW decided to investigate the history syllabus in particular.
The history syllabus has remained a very controversial topic. While the "secular" accuse the BJP of saffronisation, the RSS grumble that history textbooks do not refer to its formation. The debate is cyclic and rises everytime school reforms are spoken about. The TWW noted something rather peculiar about the history program. Going through the current CBSE history syllabus for 12th and the proposed program by the NCF raises one important question in our minds: What happened to Indian history post-independence? The syllabus seems to go mum after the 1950s.
Surely what happens in contemporary India is important to our children. Why have even the adventurous new NCERT not extended the scope of teaching to include the last 50 years? Should not our children know that we won two wars and lost one? The circumstances of the emergency? When our young people come out of schools should not they be in a position to understand the reasons for why the nation is the way it is? It would be impossible for even the brightest of our youth to extrapolate 2005 from 1947. While our science and maths textbooks are more uptodate, and we are even including a segment on disaster management, why is history getting such a step-motherly treatment?
Understanding this reluctance to talk about the last fifty years of our independence is not difficult. History has been a political hot potato. Sadly for our children, the government in power seems to be the ultimate arbitrator of what can and cannot be taught. And given our tumultuous post-independence history it would be impossible to write objectively about it without slinging some mud on one's own face. While the BJP will think twice before referring to Babri Masjid, the Congress may not relish talking about the Emergency or the anti-Sikh riots.
What all this means is that our youth today will grow up not understanding why everyone talks about the Line of Control while our textbooks do not show it anywhere. Hiding Babri Masjid and Blue Star from our schools make little sense if they are to grow up into well-informed citizens tomorrow. Or are we going to rather let the media and political machinery educate them instead? Perhaps our fear of partisan opinion will mean we will need to wait for a few decades before current events can be seen in an academic and neutral light. But by then it will be too late for our children in schools today.
Yesterday evening most TV channels had extensive coverage of the CAT examination. Some channels went to the extent of analyzing the mecahnics of the exams and potential cut-offs to the various IIMs. Questions and sections and mark distributions were analyzed, and experts were called to dissect every aspect. Interviews with candidates and faculty from the IIMs beamed out all day. Alas, if only our school system would get a fraction of the attention.
