Abstract
We generally don’t remember textbooks triggering off creative ideas in our school-going youth. We do remember a particular teacher or a particular book outside the curriculum.
Many of us have learnt all our lives, as students and then as professional teachers, to negotiate textbooks carefully, as if they were studded with landmines. To use them warily to ‘write exams’ while keeping our minds clear and free of their deadening influence. There has been a more or less absolute split between the textbook on the one hand, and learning, knowledge or excitement on the other.
In the first exercise of its kind in India, a countrywide process of rethinking education, curricula and textbooks produced the National Curriculum Framework (NCF) 2005. It was born out of wide-ranging discussions with hundreds of educationists all over the country, including the lowly teachers themselves. This last fact is worth noting because most decisions on education at any level seem to be made by bureaucrats and professors whose last entry into a classroom is a matter of speculation. Practising teachers struggling with the myriad issues that arise from a lack of resources and the ever-present difficulty posed by ‘pushing the problem upwards’ — research students without a proper postgraduate education, MA students whose undergraduate training is inadequate, and so on down the line — rarely find themselves considered worthy of commenting on education reforms.
The NCF 2005 represents a creative effort to take the debate on education out of the sterile framework of ‘saffronisation’, a framework that ensures that every change in textbooks would be associated with a change of government at the centre. NCF 2005, on the other hand, attempts a thoroughgoing reflection upon pedagogical practices as much as upon the content of education — a process that has resulted in, among others, the three textbooks under review — the Social Science textbook for Class VI (Social and Political Life — I ) and the Political Science textbooks for Classes IX and XI (Democratic Politics and Indian Constitution at Work respectively). A large number of people across the country — school and college teachers, artists, educationists of various sorts — have been involved in the writing of these books, and it is evident that they have been devised with care and a great deal of thought.
What is immediately striking about all three books is the format. Colourful illustrations, photographs and well-placed boxes break up the text attractively. A very interesting innovation is the use of appropriate political cartoons by leading cartoonists from India as well as from all over the world, which the students are guided to ‘read’ through pointed questions. The book for Class XI has two cheeky figures that pop up in the margins, Munni and Unni, who ask the kind of questions that may in fact be in the students’ minds — sometimes irreverent, often just curious. The alert teacher is encouraged to initiate wide-ranging discussions in class arising from these questions. Munni is more serious and tends to wonder about things like whether we can reduce the influence of money and muscle power in politics through law. Unni is a bit of a troublemaker — at one point in the chapter on the judiciary he mutters sarcastically: ‘I am getting confused. In a democracy you can criticize the Prime Minister or even the President, but not the judges! And what is this contempt of court? Am I guilty of contempt if I asked about these matters?’ And in one mad moment of pure self-reflectivity, Unni wonders: ‘Am I just a figurehead or am I asking real questions? Did the textbook writers give me power to ask questions I wish to ask, or am I asking questions they have in their minds?’
A second striking feature is the focus on practice as much as on institutions. ‘Civics’, as it was known, and the teaching of Political Science generally, has tended to be restricted to formal institutional structures. For example, in the old book for Class VI, chapters titled ‘How village people meet their needs’ and ‘How people in cities meet their needs’ are bare bones accounts of the structure of local government — Panchayati Raj, municipalities and district administration, and how they are elected and constituted.
In the new book, the section on local government and administration addresses the topic in such a way that apart from giving information about its formal structure and constitution, students get a lively sense of the problems and disagreements that arise in the day-to-day functioning of these bodies. For instance, the chapter on Panchayati Raj starts with a story about a Gram Sabha meeting at which there are murmurs about the inclusion of people in the list of people below the poverty line (BPL) — why is Natwar on the list when he has a colour TV, and why is Om Prakash, a landless labourer, not on it? Not all the issues are sorted out at the end of the story, and the questions that are asked of the student lead her to think about the operation of power relations in daily life and why people are unable to speak for themselves. Both in the story as well as in boxes positioned with care, there is sufficient information about how Gram Sabhas and Panchayats relate to each other, how the BPL surveys are conducted, what Gram Sabhas are and so on. Students analyse at the end of the chapter an actual news item about a lower-caste villager beaten up by upper-caste men for insisting that the water from tankers organised by his village Panchayat be shared by the whole village.
There is thus, an understanding conveyed about formal structures as well as how they function in practice. The student is made aware that she has the capacity to understand the functioning of something as remote as ‘government’ and that she or he can translate the experiences of the textbook in terms of their own everyday experiences. There is no attempt to hide the fact that Indian society is riven by inequality and unequal power relations, but the message is also conveyed that this can be addressed by citizens within the constitutional framework.
An important theme of this book is diversity. Indeed, the diversity of the country is quietly present in all these books through, for example, the instances used to illustrate particular issues or through the names of the characters and the contexts in the short, dramatised incidents that raise issues for debate. However it is also clear that a crucial distinction is to be made between diversity and discrimination. Thus all ‘difference’ is not automatically valorised. In the Class VI book, for instance, while students are encouraged to think of three different ways in which people get married (‘through signing a register in court’ is given as one example) or cook rice, they also read in the next chapter a section from B.R. Ambedkar’s autobiography about how, as untouchable Mahar children, he and his cousins could not find a ride home from the railway station. After reading this story, the student is asked to reflect on whether he has experienced prejudice or witnessed discrimination. How did it make him feel?
The book for Class IX describes itself as a ‘tour of a museum of contemporary democracy’, and beginning with stories about democracy from around the world — Chile, Poland and South Africa among others — it goes on to address theoretical questions about what features go to make a democracy and encourages students to debate whether democracy is the best form of government. There are chapters about electoral democracy, the working of institutions and democratic rights. All of these are addressed in such a way that students are encouraged to think and discover the answers to difficult questions for themselves — indeed, to think about what might be the appropriate questions to ask in the first place. Hopefully, this could lead to learning to do research on one’s own. For instance, the chapter on the working of institutions has a fascinating section on ‘How is a major policy decision taken’. This section follows the progress of the Government Order that implemented reservations for Other Backward Classes in civil posts and services. From the Mandal Commission Report to the Supreme Court decision on the ‘Indira Sawhney and Others’ case, we see how a policy decision came into effect. The student is asked to think of a major decision made by her state government, and to find out how the Governor, council of ministers, state assembly and the courts were involved in the decision.
The Class XI book on the ‘constitution at work’ similarly covers the ground of the Indian government and its functioning — rights, executive, judiciary, federalism and so on — in an interesting and lively fashion. The first chapter, for instance, illustrates the need for a constitution and how it should be arrived at in a democracy by asking the students to discuss and arrive at some decisions that would apply to everyone in class for that entire session. After the decisions are arrived at, they are asked to reflect on what problems they encountered in this exercise and how they resolved differences among themselves. In this way, they are led through the functions of a constitution and to understand why we need one. The exercises they are given (called ‘puzzles’ by the writers in the Introduction) always involve thinking and analysis. At the end of the chapter on the judiciary, they read a news report, ‘Supreme Court orders REL to pay Rs 300 crore to farmers of Dahanu’, and answer questions such as ‘Visualise what the different arguments could have been that the company put forward, what arguments could the farmers have put forward’, and so on.
And thus we arrive at the third striking feature of these books — the attempted revolution in pedagogical strategies. Rather than ‘imparting information’, these books encourage analysis, open up avenues of thought and prevent — or at least try to prevent — rote learning. Students are encouraged to read and analyse letters to the editor, and to collect newspaper items on particular topics. For instance, the Class IX student, after reading about the military coup that overthrew Allende (pronounced Ayen-they, we are told) — and seeing the historic photograph of Allende hours before his death — is asked to collect news items on any country in South America for one month. Did she find the news coverage adequate? I should hasten to add that the books are not short on ‘information’, as some critics of the NCF 2005 feared they might be. It is simply that information is presented in such a way that students learn how to read critically and analytically.
One obstacle I foresee is the demand on the teacher’s role in this process, which is crucial. The teacher must be equally invested in this project of transforming pedagogical practices or else there is bound to be a vast abyss of misunderstanding between the intentions of the writers of these books and those who actually must teach them at the ground level. Gradually, through workshops and training sessions, teachers shaped by the old system must be brought into the framework of understanding that holds up these textbooks. Of course, restructuring of examinations to reflect the new pedagogies is also crucial.
Finally, one wishes that these delightful books could have been better produced. Being typical sarkari productions, their publishing quality reduces the impact of the imaginative format. It is not simply a matter of lack of resources. The powers that be have to realise that expenditure on high-quality textbook publishing is at least as remunerative as expenditure on electronic equipment, randomly distributed at the higher levels of the educational system’s food chain.