De-Intellectualisation Of Education

In a democratic society and in an educational system that is financed by the state, there is bound to bethe intervention of politics. But we cannot accept the intervention of any kind of politics. We have todifferentiate between the minimal, benign kind and what we are faced with today-a maximal, disturbing politicsthat is trying to erode both democratic society and the legitimacy of the educational system.

What is being referred to as the saffronisation of education is, in effect, the de-intellectualising ofeducation in such a severe way that little of academic value will be left in what comes to be taught in thenext few years. Totalitarian ideologies are built on cynicism and the new national curriculum is immenselycynical.

The cynicism lies in projection of the idea that education is meant to produce a generation that will thinkand behave uniformly and that too as dictated by a particular ideology. It will accept without question whatit is taught and not even be allowed to discuss what it is thinking.

The move of a few days ago of deleting passages and forbidding their discussion has given the game away.

The end result will not be a generation of educated Indians, exploring knowledge, but a generation of youngpeople merely repeating what is taught to them. The assault on history is part of the assault on knowledge. Itwill not stop with history. But history is one of the easier subjects for starting such a campaign sinceeveryone thinks they know history and there is nothing new in it. However, the undermining of history is alsoessentially the undermining of the social sciences and the danger is not limited to history but to all thesocial sciences.

This is clear from the new school curriculum where History will not be taught from Class VI to Class X andthen suddenly it will be started up in Classes XI and XII. Since there will no graduated teaching of history,moving from the simple to the complex from class to class, what will be taught in high school will have to befairly elementary and of a diluted form. History will be replaced by social studies consisting of geography,civics and a few general notions about nationalism and patriotism. Civics will presumably discuss, among otherthings, India as a society organised around caste, and will also have to discuss the policy of affirmativeaction and reservations for Dalits. Presumably it will also have to answer questions of a complex kind such asthe ones that have recently arisen in the public debate on caste and race. And how will teachers teach suchsubjects if they are forbidden from discussing the formulation of varna in history-how did it come about, andwhen, and what was the structure and the ideology that gave rise to it, and who were the groups thatmanipulated it to their advantage? Is the state assuming that if any OBC and Dalit children raise anyquestions, they will forcibly be made to shut up?

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THE recent act of deleting passages from History textbooks is motivated by a short-term and a long-termprogramme. The short term is the attempt to use this act as part of political propaganda in the comingelections in UP and Punjab. Voters will be told that the government has upheld the sensitivities of the uppercastes over the references to beef-eating, and the historicity of Rama and the Janmabhoomi temple; thesensitivities of the Jats by refusing to acknowledge that their ancestors sometimes plundered the countryside,and of the Sikhs by refusing to concede that some of their leaders may also have plundered the land to buildup their power. 

Who cares about the facts in these issues -- that in many cases plunder was seen as a recognisedway to establish power or that almost forty per cent of the Indian population has been, and still is,beef-eating and this includes the Scheduled Tribes, the Dalits, the OBCs, the Christians and the Muslims. Onlythe habits of the upper castes are to be endorsed. The long-term project is to impose the pattern of theShishu Mandir type of teaching on state schools. This is reflected in the kinds of subjects that are proposedin the new curriculum. Children will have to learn Vedic Mathematics, despite mathematicians saying that thereis nothing Vedic about this kind of maths and that it is simply an alternative way of making fastcalculations. It is unlikely that this in itself will provide the kind of mathematical foundation that schoolchildren require for subjects such as econometrics, or technologies and sciences of various kinds. Sanskritwill be compulsory and one does not object to this if it is taught as a foundation to understanding thestructure of languages used today in India, as and where relevant. And of course an appreciation of itsliterature. But more likely children will have to memorise endless amounts of grammar instead of approachingit through the logical structure of the language, and the study of the language will be made into yet anotherchannel for propagating communal Hindu theories rather than the humanism of a civilisation.

And then there are the mysterious subjects that have no pedagogy and remain guarded secrets such as Yogaand Consciousness or the concern with the Spirituality Quotient. The method of teaching in the Shishu Mandirsis through a variant on a kind of catechism-questions and answers only with no context to either. This is aconvenient technique since it is possible to fabricate both questions and answers, which are then implicitlybelieved since the students are not taught to discuss alternate ways of looking at a subject.

This approach to education will be the death of the social sciences, where the emphasis is on testing thereliability of data, observing methods of analyses and arguing logically. The links between the socialsciences have frequently led to expanding the frontiers of a subject. To take the example of beef-eating.Comparative studies of cattle economies such as those of the Nuer analysed by the anthrpologistEvans-Pritchard, or the picture that emerges from ancient texts such as the Avesta and the Rigveda, providemany insights into these societies. Cattle are not eaten indiscriminately but they are killed on specialoccasions as, for example, to honour guests, kings, priests and this becomes a mark of status. When suchreferences begin to decline and eventually a prohibition is also introduced, then the historian has to ask thequestion as to why this happened. And often the answers come from related disciplines. Was it a matter ofbelief that the cow came to be seen as 'the mother'? Or was there an environmental change with a decline ofgrazing grounds, or did agriculture supersede cattle-raising so that livestock got reduced? And what wouldhave been the effect of all this particularly on rural society?

To disallow such questions is to limit history in a ridiculous way.

Similarly, if history is to be vetted by religious organisations and each one permitted to delete whathurts its sensitivities, then, in a multi-religious society with an infinite number of religious sects such asours, there will be no end to paring down a history textbook, until we might be left with virtually nothing atall.

But this also raises another fundamental issue. Who should write the history used in schools-historians ora collection of pandits, mullahs, granthis and priests? The legitimacy of the latter is their ownself-proclaimed assertion that they represent a particular religious community. And it makes no differencethat they don't understand the first thing about history.

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THE battle today is not between Marxist historians and other historians. It is between historians andnon-historians where the latter do not understand the discipline of history and the change it has undergone inthe last half-a-century. There was a time when history was a support to a certain kind of anti-colonialnationalism and the support was effective in the national movement. It was also embedded in Indology-cullinginformation from sources and laying it out in an orderly fashion. Analysing the information with differentmethods of analyses and integrating the analyses was not what Indologists did. Over the years, from the 1960sonwards, history moved from being a part of Indology to acquiring its own methods of critical enquiry and inthe last two decades has emerged not only as a sophisticated intellectual discipline but also capable ofproviding insights into the past which have helped us understand our past. History is now part of the socialand human sciences and demands rigorous ways of looking at the past. This change seems to have gone unnoticedby those who are now controlling our institutions and writing our textbooks. They still assume that it is astory which can be a fantasy or a myth dictated by anyone's whim and channelled into whatever propaganda thepoliticians and their minions choose to support.

This is not a situation that we can live with quietly and hope that it will pass. It is a situation thatneeds to be opposed and the opposition has to be visible. I would like to suggest three ways in which thisvisibility could be made apparent.

We have to assert the academic foundations of the discipline of history and insist that these be prominentand be encouraged wherever history is taught or historical matters are under discussion.

We also have to watch out for attempts to erode other social science disciplines. Archaeology, which wasbeginning to provide evidence on material culture and which sometimes raised doubts about statements in textsand sometimes corroborated these statements, is now being distorted in various ways. Questions of origins andidentity determining who is indigenous and who is alien, cannot be answered by archaeology, yet archaeologicaldata is being forced into supporting political theories. A spurious sociology and social anthropology arelikely to be the next disciplines to be falsified, since they are both concerned with concepts of caste.

Secondly, I think that we have to take the initiative and start investigating what is taught in the ShishuMandirs and the madrassas and other similar institutions. Are they all motivated by the same philosophy or arethere differences and if so what are these and why. These institutions are becoming the articulation of largegroups of people. We should investigate their courses and methods of teaching and possibly even reach out tothe students by presenting alternative ways of looking at a subject. The latter may be too ambitious. But theabsurdity of the way many of the subjects are taught in such schools, as for example their question-answerformat on geography, needs to be critiqued more publicly. People need to be made aware of the fact that aschool education is concerned as much with the contents of what is taught as with the obtaining of marks: andfurther that the content of education is what goes towards the creation of the future society. There seems tobe an increasing disinterest in these matters. The obsession with marks will have to give way to content ifthere is to be a quality education.

Finally, and most importantly, I would like to raise the issue of transparency in procedures and theright of any state institution to appropriate and reconfigure the texts of authors. For many stateactivities in India, procedures have been established even though they may not be closely followed. In thesixties when the NCERT textbooks were written there was a procedure : a committee of historians selected theauthors, the drafts of the books were vetted by the committee and discussed in considerable detail, the draftswere sent to other historians, if thought necessary, to get an opinion and were then printed. Even afterpublication if any changes were suggested by any organisation or historian, these were discussed with theauthor by the committee and a decision taken on whether or not to make a change.

This basic procedure of getting historians with acceptable credentials to write the books and then put themthrough peer group review was fundamental to the writing of these books. This was also a great source ofstrength to the author.

None of these procedures are now being observed. Passages are deleted at the whim of the Minister, theNCERT, the CBSE. There is no reference to other historians but only to some representatives of religiousorganisations. The authors of the new books that are being written to replace ours are unknown to anyone. Theyare writing in hideouts and with a secrecy that would be envied even by Osama bin Laden. Where is the need forall this secrecy? The books will in any case be judged by historians once they are published. Or is it theintention that however good or bad the books may be they will rapidly be put into circulation and that will bea fait accompli which no one can oppose. Do we have to have all this infantile cloak-and-dagger stuff when itcomes to the responsibility of writing textbooks for schools?

That the state should take it upon itself to delete passages without review and disallow discussion, isperhaps the most odious aspect of what has been happening. This is a matter that does not concern textbooksalone, although it has been projected as an assault on history. Once a state gets infected withtotalitarianism, it will not stop at excising textbooks but will excise all manner of rights and principlesessential to civil liberties. This is the greater and more enveloping danger and it requires of us that we bealert to even more major deletions of other kinds.