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Curriculum as politics
By Krishna Kumar
A fortnight after receiving a notice from the National Human Rights Commission (NHRC), the NCERT
released its new syllabi and guidelines for all stages of school education. The vigorous distribution of this
four-volume document suggests that the NCERT sees no connection between the NHRC’s notice and the new
syllabi.
It is also going ahead with the preparation of new textbooks which will be introduced in April.
Whether the NCERT perceives a connection or not, the NHRC notice has everything to do with the new syllabi and
textbooks under preparation.
The NHRC notice argues that the State’s responsibility to provide education
to every child cannot
be seen in isolation from the quality of the education to be provided. The notice says that the “right to education of
every child is clearly a human right, and its proper direction a human rights issue”. Those in charge of planning
education must ensure that children are given access to different sources of information, and that they are
intellectually trained to make informed choices about their own lives. If it is alleged that education might distort
children’s development, the allegation must be investigated as a human rights issue.
The NCERT and the HRD ministry were given eight weeks — up to March 8 — to respond to the
notice. The NHRC’s concern for this case has created a new historic situation — and not just because those who
have the authority to provide education as a human right are being asked to explain why they should not be
charged of violating it. It is the logic of the NHRC’s notice that is historically new.
It is for the first time that pedagogic and curricular issues which pertain to the quality of education
are being given the same status as the issue of provision. No State institution has ever given this status to
pedagogy. Indian planners have been used to defending their neglect of quality-related issues by citing the vast
spread of illiteracy and saying: Let us focus on access first, we can look into quality later.
This attitude gained legitimacy and popularity in the last decade during which professional norms
governing school teaching were replaced in states by the policy to appoint cheap para-teachers. Similarly, the
norms of curriculum planning were overshadowed by ideological imperatives. These trends have been
exacerbated by reckless privatisation and withdrawal of the State — under the attractive banners of decentralisation
and community participation. A frustrating situation has emerged for those who expected globalisation to act as a
source of pressure for educational reform.
In the midst of a chaos of norms, an insidious move has been launched to use the school curriculum
as a political tool. The NCERT is a victim and a key player in this process. The National Curriculum Framework it
published two years ago was nothing but a means to create dissonance. Making noises, it tried to mask the
shifting of educational policy away from the concern for equity and social justice. The new focus was on moral and
ideological control for an era of social turmoil and economic uncertainty.
The new syllabi and guidelines continue this attempt. If you see the new syllabi from the child’s
perspective, you would think that they offer little more than a haphazard reorganisation of knowledge-items,
prefaced by verbose preaching about the aims and objectives of education. As Rohit Dhankar had shown in his
analysis of the Curriculum Framework, here too there is no linkage between aims and the suggested content. In the
absence of any psychological or epistemic considerations, ideology provides what little coherence it can. The slogan
of value-orientation and the rhetoric of national pride fill up numerous nooks and crannies across the curriculum of
different subjects.
The NCERT claims that it has taken two years to accomplish this job. The timing of the new syllabus
shows contempt for teachers and publishers of textbooks. In the so-called developed world, the normal gestation
period of new textbooks is three to four years; in some countries, it extends to five or six years. In the two months
that the NCERT has given, private publishers can only do a shoddy job, both in writing and production.
The sufferers will be children who cannot protest, and their teachers whose protest does not count.
They will be expected to switch over to the teaching of new items of knowledge included in the revised syllabi.
The Class VI teacher will now have to suddenly prepare herself to teach “the salient features, the
spread, the teaching(s) and the basic values” of all major religions associated with the ancient period —Hinduism,
Confucianism, Zoroastrianism, Judaism and Christianity. The syllabus says that the “learning outcome(s)” of the
unit to which the study of these religions belongs will include the ability “to know and appreciate the major features
of different religions, their contributions and their underlying unity”.
It is obvious that the NCERT does not really expect anything other than the ability to regurgitate
correct answers; otherwise, how can the aim quoted above be justified in the context of 11-year olds? Now imagine
the plight of the Class VII teacher who must ensure that her 12-year-old students “understand important
developments such as the Renaissance and
Reformation which took place in Europe and their impact”.
All this and numerous such items figure in a curriculum plan which claims to reduce the burden of
bookish knowledge on children. If only the NCERT’s experts had read the Yashpal Committee’s report with care,
they might have had some idea of what terms like ‘understand’ and ‘know’ mean in the context of children. The
activities suggested in the new syllabus are so
pedestrian that anyone familiar with our system would guess the NCERT has no real intention of changing the
entrenched lecture method.
The lack of sensible linkages between the different stages of school education has been an old
weakness of Indian curriculum planning. That problem is also evident in these new syllabi. Between the primary (I-V)
and the middle or
upper primary (VI-VIII) classes, the disjunction is so visible, you don’t need experts to notice it.
From the ridiculously rudimentary information-base of the primary-level environment science, the
Class VI syllabus jumps to information-packed separate syllabi for the natural and the social sciences. We can
anticipate a heavier drop-out rate than what prevails now between these two levels as a result of children’s inability
to cope with the demands, not to speak of the
teacher’s inability to deal with any topic with confidence.
The syllabi show total indifference to the conditions under which the overwhelming majority of our
teachers work and also to the recommendation repeatedly given since the Secondary Education Commission of the
early Fifties, that heuristic principles should be fundamental to curriculum planning.
The debate on curriculum has remained so stuck with history that the all-round lack of depth
displayed in this so-called renewal process has been overlooked. How casual the NCERT is about this exercise is
exemplified in its latest move to mollify its historian critics. The brevity of the Class XI syllabus for medieval
Indian history had drawn flak from experts, so a “slight
amendment” has been announced last week. It increases the number of units on medieval India from 3 to 22. That
is “slight” indeed.
What these additional units will contain is yet to be seen, but it is clear that the NCERT regards
syllabus-making as an essentially political task, tuned to arousing opposition when it suits to do so, and to placate
the critics when that becomes necessary. For some reason the NCERT has suddenly decided to come on the
defensive. All along these past months, it was pretending that its critics were a handful of disgruntled historians.
One wishes the NCERT recognises that the biggest body of people fed up
with its arrogance and
its antics consists of teachers, and it is on their cooperation that the success of any curriculum change depends.