Look beyond ideological tussle

ENOUGH has already been said and written about the dynamics of ‘ideology and curriculum’ — or, to put it more specifically, the politics of knowledge that led to the deletion of select chapters, paragraphs, illustrations and information from NCERT school textbooks. While the liberal/left academic fraternity expressed its angst and unhappiness over this politically engineered deletion, the academic bureaucracy that runs the NCERT in these toxic times legitimised this act in the name of ‘rationalisation’ or reducing the academic burden and giving some relief to overstressed students.

Amid the debate on NCERT textbooks, what seems to be missing is the actual reality of classroom communication.

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Yes, in this debate, we witnessed interesting reflections on the steady rise of Hindutva and its hegemonic urge to define and shape the contents of knowledge. And above all, we also experienced the implications of the transfer of power — the way the ideologues of hyper-nationalism began to replace the bunch of liberal/left historians and social scientists as the new bosses with the power to decide what our children should or should not learn. However, amid this intense debate and ideological contestation, what seems to be missing is the actual reality of classroom communication — the absence of the agency of the teacher or the curiosity of the young learner.

We ought to be honest enough to admit that our academic bosses, irrespective of their political colours, have not paid adequate attention to the act of routinised teaching/learning in overcrowded classrooms. In fact, schoolteachers, for all practical purposes, have been reduced to mere mediators between the prescribed textbooks over which they have no say and their students existing as empty vessels. Seldom are they encouraged to play any significant role in shaping the curriculum, reflecting on the nature of textbooks, or evolving the appropriate pedagogic art. Well, ‘big’ names — university professors and scholars, liberal/left intelligentsia, or, for that matter, rightist ideologues in contemporary India — decide what ought to be included in the curriculum.

Not surprisingly, it is assumed that the teacher’s task is nothing more than delivering the knowledge capsule contained in the text, and asking his/her students to master the technique of memorising these frozen words, and write utterly unimaginative answers in examinations that demand nothing beyond rote learning. Moreover, when the tyranny of the textbook (or, ‘guide books’ as strategic options) defines what is ‘worth learning’, and there is nothing outside the ‘syllabus’, the teacher’s creative agency is bound to wither away.

Furthermore, a system that equates education primarily with tests and examinations based on the ‘official’ syllabus is likely to demotivate teachers as well as students to practise the art of what Brazilian educator Paulo Freire would have regarded as ‘problem-posing’ education. Hence, to take a revealing illustration, if the revised NCERT textbook doesn’t want young learners to know the politics of Nathuram Godse that led to Mahatma Gandhi’s assassination, let it be so. Why should the teacher and the student bother to see beyond the text, enquire further, problematise the ‘sanctity’ of the book, and know what the text seeks to hide? Or, why should they bother to know something outside the ‘syllabus’ — say, the horror of the Emergency, the violence of 2002 Gujarat riots, and the questions relating to development, displacement and ecology the Narmada Bachao Andolan raised?

Although there is every reason to critique the rightist assault on textbooks, are we sure that, given the present practice of non-reflexive/non-dialogic education in our classrooms, anything would fundamentally alter even if the perspectives of luminaries such as Romila Thapar and Krishna Kumar are included in NCERT textbooks? In fact, in the age of MCQ-centric standardised tests, or neurotic obsession with 99 per cent marks in board examinations, everything becomes upside down. A poem by Pablo Neruda or Kamala Das, or a revealing cartoon by RK Laxman as a pedagogic tool is reduced to a mere two-mark question — an object of quick consumption through rote learning. Accept it — here is a system that adores the mechanical production of ‘toppers’, not necessarily thinkers, potential researchers or creative minds.

Hence, if we are genuinely concerned about meaningful education and the fate of our children, we need to see beyond the politico-ideological tussle between the leftists and the rightists over the authorship of the NCERT textbooks.

Instead, we need to strive for a system that encourages and trusts the creative agency of the teacher, the possibility implicit in every child, and the efficacy of dialogue and critical thinking in emancipatory education. Imagine a living and vibrant classroom — students and teachers are conversing, debating and seeing beyond the official syllabus. Imagine a teacher urging her Class XII students to read Bhagat Singh’s diary, write an essay on Gandhi’s prayer meetings in 1947-48, or reflecting on a story written by Manto. Or, for that matter, imagine a young student of Class VIII borrowing the books of Ruskin Bond and RK Narayan from the school library, and urging his/her teacher to initiate a discussion on their literary creations. This is like seeing the textbook — even if written by great scholars — as just a catalyst, and then going beyond it. Once this creative/critical faculty is sharpened, children can naturally develop the intellectual and cognitive capacity to question, interrogate and see beyond the syllabus, the prescribed textbook, or, for that matter, what is circulated through the toxic social media and the propaganda machinery, and regarded as the dominant common sense of the age.

But then, who bothers about the making of and the recruitment of truly motivated persons in the vocation of teaching, particularly school teaching? And who bothers about the creatively nuanced critical pedagogy that dares to see beyond the contents of ‘leftist’ or ‘rightist’ texts — Gandhi or Savarkar, Aurangzeb or Shivaji?