The National Council of Education Research and Training (NCERT) has been in the news. In July 2023, an NCERT notification announced a 19-member panel to finalise textbooks and learning materials for schools under the National Education Policy (NEP) 2020. Celebrity mathematicians, musicians, sports personnel along with a host of big names constitute the committee. Whether due process was followed or not is not quite the point, for this has long been replaced by a culture of ordinances. Both due process and accountability, whether in matters of state functioning or in the matter of knowledge production, are dispensable. This announcement, therefore, needs to be placed in a larger context of a certain approach, with a particular design and messaging, that the regime has mastered. g. For, as we are told, everything is about ‘perceptions’.The details are dispensable. That in a country as diverse and unequal as ours, most members of the committee come from a certain demography does not seem to matter. That almost all are aligned to the government also does not matter. Many of them are accomplished in their own field but there seems little in evidence of their familiarity with pedagogic issues. While few of them have excellent academic credentials in their field (mathematics in specific) one wonders whether they have engaged with the unequal conditions of Indian school education, persistent drop out rates and dismal learning outcomes. Also read: If NCERT Has its Way, the Study of Indian History Will Move Entirely Outside of IndiaThe use of such names is clearly not about hands-on expertise but about invoking authority. Can one ask whether the members agree with the deletion of the periodic table or with the explanations of evolution and electromagnetism from the textbooks used by children aged 14–16? And indeed if they do, an explicit stating of rationale and an ensuing debate among experts would be in the spirit of the NEP goal of ‘critical thinking and problem solving’. The NCERT however has kept it simple and routine. The changes to the textbooks, they reiterated, were being made in view of the COVID-19 pandemic, and to “reduce the content load” on students.And if the deletion is prompted by the need to learn more about India’s precolonial history of science, does this entail removing fundamental scientific content. For those more familiar with the issue have written, India is not the only postcolonial country grappling with the question of how to honour and recognise older or Indigenous forms of knowledge in its school curricula. Further proven efforts have been made in India in this direction. A cursory look at the National Curriculum Framework (NCF) 2005 will show this. In May 2023, several topics and portions from the NCERT textbooks were dropped. Certain sentences on Mahatma Gandhi, his assassin Nathuram Godse, the role of Hindu extremists, the Emergency, the 1984 anti-Sikh riots and the 2002 Gujarat riots, the Mughal era, Delhi Sultanate andthe caste system were deleted from school textbooks. Questions were raised about the lack of ‘transparency’ and engagement in the public domain. TheNCERT responded by saying that such “minor” changes need not be notified as they are “regular” and routine changes are not notified to avoid “any confusion at the level of teachers and students”. Deletions of ‘facts’ such as Gandhi’s assassin and his role in combating communal frenzy are therefore happenstance; just another set of topics in the syllabus that can be omitted to ease the burden on students. That this is not quite true is evident from the careful analysis of what has been deleted and what remains.In dropping the 1984 and 2002 riots, there are two messages: one, of appearing even handed (riots have been dropped irrespective of regimes), of conveying a simplified and faulty sense of ‘neutrality’ and ‘objectivity’; and two, of presenting a picture of an idealised society, a positive picture that fits well with the spirit of triumphant nationalism. That fine distinction between what is and what ought to be falls outside this syllabus.Also read: Biology Without Darwin. Next, Physics Without Newton and Einstein?This matter of ‘objectivity’ rests on slippery terrain. In November-December 2020, a controversy erupted over a multiple-choice question in the Class 12 Sociology examination that said: “The unprecedented scale and spread of anti-Muslim violence in Gujarat in 2002 took place under which government?” The options offered to answer this question were: “Congress”, “BJP”, “Democratic” and “Republican”. The Central Board of School Education (CBSE) stated that “question was inappropriate” and “the questions should be academic-oriented only and not touch upon domains that could harm sentiments of people based on social and political choices.” The board issued an apology and action was to be taken against those who set the paper. The tone when responding to the NCERT deletions is calm, reasoned and practical. It is a matter of routine functioning that is targeted at anxious parents, teachers and students. This approach works along with the shrill rhetoric and bombastic claims of the current regime. The announcement of the 19-member high powered committee belongs to the regime’s repertoire of grandiloquent announcements in consonance with chest thumping nationalism. It is the awe and shock moment addressed to a wider public. The messaging is to silence the critic and create a feel good factor for the supporter. Social media posts suggest that the message has reached for whom it was intended.Nine years is a long time. It is certainly long enough to gauge the cunningness of a regime that is intent to break with a past that they disdained and were never reconciled to. But sans state power, one that they had to live with. The past that I refer to is modern India’s tryst with democratic ideas of freedom and dissent, equality and social justice, pluralism and diversity. And the intent, however faultily played out, to develop a spirit of critical enquiry seen as a necessary enabler of democracy. The task of doing so in a deeply unequal society was not easy. Given the embedded nature of rote education and the idea of knowledge as a given, the challenge is enormous. This matter unfortunately did not receive much attention. The NCF 2005 in many ways was an exception, seeking as it did, to encourage a critical perspective, connect the lived world of the students with textbooks and enable them to make sense of the links between the self and society. However, the idea that education is about ‘facts’ and ‘topics’ is embedded in society and remains the dominant view. Textbooks, therefore, are essentially about content. The syllabus is an aggregate of topics. Dropping evolution or Gandhi’s assassination is just about reducing topics. Evaluation rests on the ability to recall ‘facts’ which usually means events, definitions, dates and names associated with the topics. One recalls an instance where some teachers complained that there is too little content in the sociology textbooks. It was then suggested this could be rectified by adding some details on the Five Year Plans. ‘Content’ would thereby be strengthened. Questions more easily formulated. Model answers more easily prepared. There is a practical logic to patterned answers. Evaluation is easier. It is supposed to be more ‘objective’. But above all it makes learning, i.e. ‘remembering’ ‘easy’. We normally do not discuss this as our received culture of knowledge wherein the syllabi is sacrosanct; its sole purpose being completion or selectively covered by the teacher and student alike within a given time frame. This routine is the very stuff of everyday practice of school education. It is also the micro level context within which teachers, students and boards operate. This has been a persistent bane in our educational system. What has changed dramatically is a macro context wherein the state seeks to dismantle the core ideas of equality, liberty and fraternity. Academic freedom and critical education is being systematically dismantled even as the NEP talks of flexibility, creativity and critical thinking. Indeed this doublespeak is a hallmark of the current regime. Maitrayee Chaudhuri is a retired professor of Sociology, Jawaharlal Nehru University.
