A recent expert study points to the danger of leaving textbook production to private players or State governments and the need to create a content that is in accordance with the Constitution.
THE problems of school education in India are so vast and well-known that they scarcely require reiteration. Yet in recent years the debate has been focussed not on the more obvious shortcomings - such as lack of infrastructure and basic facilities, large and unfeasible student-teacher ratios and poor training and motivation of teachers - but on the issue of curriculum.
This is because the National Democratic Alliance (NDA) government, while it did very little to address the basic problems, was extremely determined to change the content of education and thereby influence both social attitudes and perceptions of what constitutes knowledge among the young. There were systematic intrusions of communal and gender biases and prejudices, the inculcation of perceptions of "difference" across communities, and even distortions of reality, especially in history and social sciences.
It is not unnatural, therefore, that over the past year concerns about the changes in the curriculum and content have become the major focus of attention since they can do so much to change the way the future generations will think and respond. Quite obviously, the content of what comes in school texts and other pedagogic material is too important to be ignored.
It is important not only because of the adverse possibilities raised by certain types of prejudice being pushed by problematic content, but also because fundamentally, education is to fulfil social goals. Those participating in the process of education - teachers, students, framers of curriculum and writers of texts - therefore need to be very clear about what the purpose of education is.
For much of the post-Independence period, the answer to such a question was obvious: education was fundamentally about creating informed and questioning citizens; reducing the role of superstition and enhancing what was called the "scientific temper" and critical thinking; emphasising equality, tolerance and appreciation of diversity within society; and of course, developing socially necessary skills. Only recently did the answer implicitly change.
Commercialisation combined with the existing economic inequalities created systems of skill development that essentially benefited a small minority rather than the society that paid for the process. "Human capital formation" thus became the privilege of the elite that could access publicly subsidised higher education or afford expensive private provision of it. In recent years, "value education" became a more dubious concept, with undertones of revanchist and backward looking ideologies that relegated women, minority communities and particular social groups to inferior status and marginal recognition.
In this context, it is disturbing to see that the proposed National Curriculum Framework (NCF) 2005 brought out by the National Council of Educational Research and Training (NCERT), and currently being discussed, tends to denigrate the role of textbooks and emphasises instead "local knowledge" and teaching based on personal experience. While such ideas are progressive in certain contexts, they require what in an Indian context can only be called a very elite setting with trained and responsive teachers operating with all facilities and a low student-teacher ratio.
In India at the moment, where around one-fifth of all rural primary schools do not even have a building, and where another one-fourth have only one room and one teacher for all the classes, this flexibility and freedom from the tyranny of textbooks is likely to be a recipe for non-learning, thereby enlarging the gap between the privileged few with access to good quality education, and all the rest.
Indeed, the NCF 2005 document itself recognises this at one point, in the section dealing with natural sciences, where it notes: "We must use textbooks as one of the primary instruments for equity, since for a great majority of school-going children, as also for their teachers, it is the only accessible and affordable resource for education."
The NCF 2005, however, focuses upon the preparation of multiple textbooks, including those by private publishers. But many years ago, the Education Commission had pointed out that textbooks produced at the national level not only provide examples for others, but also play the critical role of setting standards, "which can indicate the expected standard of attainment far more precisely than any curricula or syllabi; and their practical use in schools is the surest method to raise standards and [make] the teaching in schools in different parts of the country fairly comparable." It should be noted that all educationally successful countries indeed do follow the practice of using national-level textbooks in schools as far as possible.
JUST how important this question is, and why something urgently needs to be done about it, is glaringly evident from a recent report produced by the Central Advisory Board of Education (CABE) Committee (headed by Zoya Hasan and Gopal Guru) on "Regulatory mechanisms for textbooks and parallel textbooks taught in schools outside the government system". This committee was asked to study and report on both textbooks used in government schools not following the Central Board of Secondary Education (CBSE) syllabus, as well as books used in non-government schools, including those run by religious and social organisations.
Many experts from States all over India were brought into the process of survey, analysis and discussion on suitable recommendations. The resultant analysis provides both in-depth analysis of government and private publications used in different States and a detailed map of the institutional procedures followed by each State.
The report makes frightening reading. The committee's investigations suggested that while the extent of control varies, the procedures for textbook production by various State governments and private publishers tend to be followed mechanically without really addressing the core curricular concerns. More worryingly, the content analysis found very disturbing tendencies.
According to the report, textbooks in which communal ideology shapes the contours of the understanding of Indian history, society and culture, proliferate now. There were many examples of passages that violate historical fact, deny India's composite culture, endorse caste hierarchies eschewed by the Constitution and even encourage a culture of violence that disregards the law. The reports from the States point out how textbooks reinforce inequalities by adopting the perspective of classes and groups possessing power and privilege. Thus, rural realities and the experience of women and Dalits are seldom visible, either in illustrations or in the selections in language anthologies.
There is little recognition of the child's immediate environment: even State-level textbooks have little on regional history or geography. It appears that even government publications are insensitive in their interpretation of the many-stranded and multi-dimensional history of the country. Reports from most States provide examples of how communal and caste divisions are emphasised and reinforced in often crude ways. Gender inequities and prejudices also are perpetuated, and the social issues underlying women's inequality are typically not adequately explained. In many privately produced textbooks, the problem is more intense. Thus, a Moral Science guide in Karnataka states that a woman should put up with her husband's violence in the hope of happiness when her son grows up. The sex-segregated curricula in madrassas teach women their domestic roles, while there is no mention of men's domestic responsibilities.
However, women at least appear in most textbooks - reports from most States point out that Dalits and tribal groups are largely invisible in textbooks, aside from statements like "tribal people still inhabit the Bastar region", which effectively undermine their claims as citizens in modern India.
Economic inequalities are also underplayed or simply ignored thereby making it hard for less privileged children to relate themselves to textbooks. For example, illustrations accompanying the description of a balanced diet show a child that would be identified as one from the urban middle class by details of dress and cutlery. This effectively excludes most potential readers from what the text prescribes as a healthy meal, which in any case often consists of items hard for poor families to procure. The report from Madhya Pradesh actually argues that there is a connection between dropout rates among students of low economic backgrounds and the fact that there is little in textbooks for them to relate to or understand.
All this makes it abundantly clear that the production of textbooks cannot be treated as any ordinary activity that can be left to private players or even, unfortunately, State governments, without any supervision or regulation. If all our children are to be ensured access to a meaningful quality education, educational materials must be produced within the framework of the Constitution and according to processes transparent to the public.
The CABE Committee has suggested a range of measures, including procedures for approving curricular materials that would include a serious appraisal by academic experts of their adherence to the core principles of egalitarianism, democracy and secularism, as well the setting up of a National Textbook Council to monitor textbooks. While these proposals need to be considered and debated, they provide an important step forward in clearing up what has obviously become a generalised mess in the provision of content in school education.
