Spurious
Textbooks
By Suvi Dogra
09 June, 2007
Combat
Law
India
has, indeed, been pushed to a stage where schools are no longer untouched
by political battles. Shrewd attempts are on to mobilise future generations
for a particular brand of politics. Since late 1990s, education has
been becoming quite a contentious issue. The heat generated by this
has come to blur the priorities that the nation had once set –
to achieve an emancipated, forward looking, knowledgeable and egalitarian
society.
Today, the knowledge system
is being deeply interwoven with politics of power. How can textbooks
be deployed as a tool to legitimise ideology of the government in power
and work towards creating hegemony? Change in the content of textbooks,
on the pretext of preserving culture and national identity, can be dangerous
as it has the potential to polarise the nation. Cultural constructs
that give precedence to Hindu culture can lead to hate and ire against
the ‘other’. Falsification and distortion of Indian history
is another outcome of this zeal to paint the society as a monolithic
entity.
A Delhi based NGO, Nirnatar’s
research project on school textbooks in Rajasthan highlights the misuse
of textbooks for propagating religion-based ideology. Schools or Hate-Labs,
is an analysis of the school textbooks of Rajasthan by Apoorvanand.
The book traces a bit of
the history of textbook writing and refers to the recent debates around
NCERT textbooks. Exploring the concept of ‘cultural nationalism’,
the author finds that it is turning out to be a subtle way of propagating
the RSS concept of a Hindu nation since it is finding its way in the
textbooks being taught in the schools of Rajasthan.
The book has quoted many
examples from the textbooks to drive home the point that with such textbooks
the entire classrooms can be turned into virtual ‘hate-labs.’
The textbooks, according to the study, are often flawed in terms of
facts, content and interpretations of historical events. Apparent instances
of political bias further degrade the credibility of the books and their
authors.
Many examples from the sociology
and political science textbooks of class IX to class XI have been cited
which try to convey the idea that Hindu religion is far more ‘Indian’
than other faiths can be. The sociology book for Class XI titled ‘Indian
social institutions: Religion, education and law’ reasserts the
superiority of Hindu religion and equates ‘Hindu’ with ‘Indian’.
The basic premise behind all these textbooks is that Aryan culture is
synonymous with Indian culture.
The Sanskrit textbook of
class X seems to draw from the attempts of the RSS to train young minds
with its ideology for VD Savarkar is presented in the Sanskrit reader
as a national icon from the days of our freedom struggle. Similarly,
various other textbooks too try to project the RSS as a great and only
nationalist organisation.
Sadly, for the first generation
schoolgoers there is no other option but to accept such state-supplied
books. The tragedy is that the education system is solely based on arriving
at answers using the prescribed books. Thus, the students are compelled
to depend on information that may or may not be true.
The books of Rajasthan for
2006 from the Secondary Education Board do not fulfil the basic requisite
of a school textbook. Instead, they pose a moral question before the
educationists and politicians of the country — Why do the scales
of power govern what the children and their impressionable minds should
learn? These textbooks are outright regressive as they fail to imbibe
the true democratic and secular values. Will children continue to be
inflicted with crude distortion of facts on the pretext of being provided
knowledge by the schools?
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