Textbooks are not like the Internet where anything goes

National curriculum framework & the social sciences: Romila Thapar The Hindu Monday, Sep 05, 2005 Textbooks should certainly be child-friendly but it is equally necessary that the schoolteacher should be made child-friendly. Teachers need a more intensive exposure to social science concepts, changes in data and methods in history, and critical enquiry.

A curriculum framework has to address educational programmes as well as acquainting society with what the next generation is being taught and why. There has, however, been less concern with other constituent subjects of the social sciences, namely the input of geography, politics, economics, and sociology. Is this public apathy due to the social sciences being seen by the public as non-utility subjects, therefore less important than the sciences, which is the complaint of the NCF? That the approach of the social sciences is relevant to scientists as part of integrated knowledge needs emphasising.

Textbooks are not the only source of knowledge in school nor the only way of encouraging the development of a critical mind, although if sufficiently sensitively written (and this is rare), they can perform both functions. The accepted function of textbooks is to provide a framework for the student to access knowledge in a particular subject. We generally don't remember textbooks triggering off creative ideas in our school-going youth. We do remember a particular teacher or a particular book outside the curriculum. A textbook in history should provide the infrastructure of the subject: reliable information about the past, an explanation of how this information can be analysed, and what this tells us implicitly or explicitly about aspects of the society in which we live. The range selected would vary according to the syllabus requirement. As more data become available and causal connections are enlarged, the analyses can change.

The old textbooks are critiqued, as being heavy and dull and therefore diverting students from history, and for being concerned with developmental issues. Development as such may be out of fashion these days, but the issues with which these older textbooks were concerned are still with us. They will have to be addressed in whatever textbooks are used, issues such as the causes of economic inequality, the continuity of social privilege, the intervention of religious institutions in civic life, and the use of religious ideologies for political mobilisation. Indian society in its history has experienced considerable achievements but has also had to grapple with inequality, injustices, and violence. These are of significance in understanding the present.

According to the NCF, the old textbooks should give way to books with a child-centred pedagogy. Textbooks should certainly be accessible to the young readers for whom they are intended. However, there is some fear that the emphasis on pedagogy may erode the disciplinary orientation of the subject. Each of the social sciences has its specific take on knowledge and students should be made familiar with these. To pose normative issues in the polity such as equality, justice, and dignity as alternatives to developmental issues hints at avoiding the question of why poverty, illiteracy, casteism, and communalism have come about. How secularism, democracy, and human rights became a concern in Indian society are themes significant to the social sciences.

The document says that the social sciences will explain diversities in Indian society with references to local conditions so that the existence of variants can be understood by children in their local context. One hopes that the social sciences will also explain how diversities came or come into being, why there is an inequality among diverse groups, and how attitudes supporting this inequality are constructed. Furthermore, how diversities can be a source of enrichment to some cultures, but can also in some other cases become agencies of oppression. Local conditions and surroundings can be more purposefully studied if they are also seen in the context of a larger national perspective. A `national' framework assumes this perspective.

Textbooks should certainly be child-friendly but it is equally necessary that the schoolteacher should be made child-friendly. It is not enough to encourage participative discussions between teachers and students in class. An extensive programme of familiarising schoolteachers both with changes in the methods and concepts of the social sciences and with child-centred pedagogy will help. Without this, there will be no essential change in either the approach to the subject or the pedagogy. Children will still be required to memorise sections of the new or old textbook and reproduce these for the exam. Instant workshops for history teachers are not going to make a dent. Teachers need a more intensive exposure if they are to understand the concepts of the social sciences, the changes in data and methods that disciplines such as history have undergone in the last fifty years, and to realise the significance of critical enquiry to education, which is said to be the aim of the NCF.

A quality textbook would suggest further reading. But books that claim to be textbooks, irrespective of who publishes them, if they are treated as reliable in the knowledge they convey, must be vetted by a committee of professional scholars in the particular subject and such as are respected by their peer group. Such a committee would be responsible to the public and to the educational system for clearing the disciplinary content of textbooks. Otherwise, textbooks will become like the Internet where anything goes. One has heard so often from school students about their anxiety as to which historical interpretation to quote in an answer to an examination question, the fear being that one does not know which view is favoured by the examiner. Critical thinking would make such a dilemma relatively redundant, but only if the examiner is sensitive to critical thinking. (The writer, an eminent historian of early India, is Professor Emeritus of History at Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi.)