Resisting the Culture of Schooling Series - II
A Fate Worse than Communalism:
Shikshantar: The Peoples’ Institute for
Rethinking Education and Development
The author is grateful for the enriching feedback
and comments to this paper. Special
thanks to: Vivek Bhandari, Zaid Hassan, Manish Jain, Vachel Miller, Isaac Ochien’g, Eron Sandler
The ‘Resisting the Culture of Schooling Series’ is dedicated to
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A Fate Worse than Communalism
Amidst their usual
demands for universalizing primary education and increasing allocations to the
education budget, these days mainstream education circles are concerned with
the 'saffronisation' of education in the new
curriculum framework. Any true
progressive Indian, all secularists, every serious educationist, is up in arms
(or expected to be) about this latest ploy of the BJP government and Sangh Parivar. Indeed, pages and pages are circulating, both
in print and on the world wide web, about how the national curriculum framework
is an exercise in hatred and divisiveness (“It is vilifying minorities and
proclaiming Hindu supremacy”). Others
are more troubled by how it will prevent Indian children from competing in the
global economy (“In lieu of a proper emphasis on science and English, our
children will be taught Sanskrit, Hindu math, and moral values”).[1]
Perhaps the most sensitive of all subjects is history, with new textbooks being
rewritten from a Hindutva standpoint. At best, these books have been called
arrogant and xenophobic; at worst, they have been condemned as downright
deceitful.
In no way do I intend to
belittle concerns about communal hatred and violence. They are relevant and urgent — particularly
given the current political climate, with the
The basic problem is not the
installation of a Hindutva curriculum in the
education system. It is that every
curriculum implements the overall project of modern education: thought-control,
indoctrination, social-engineering, manipulation. What I seek to demonstrate in this essay is
that the education system is a
propaganda machine. If the Sangh Parivar’s propaganda is not
used to fill school walls, then someone’s
propaganda will be. Yours? Mine?
Indeed, the more I deeply engage with the current debate, the more irony
I perceive in it. The parties involved
seem to be more interested in deciding whose
propaganda gets transmitted through education, rather than questioning the
transmission of propaganda itself — much less the role that
‘education-as-propaganda’ plays in a so-called democratic society.[2]
For this reason, I am surprised
by mainstream education circles’ outrage over the ‘saffronisation’
of the national curriculum framework.
Isn't the very purpose of a national curriculum (and a schooling system)
to serve the interests and agendas of the dominant strata of society — whether
political, economic or, more accurately, both?
For example:
§
First, the curriculum was instituted by racist
colonizers, bent on building subservience to the
§
Then, it was taken over by technocratic
secularists, bent on building allegiance to a modern Indian state.
§
Now, it is in the hands of bigot communalists,
bent on building patriotism to a homogenous Hindu nation.
§
Tomorrow, it will be bought by greedy globalists, bent on building addiction to huge consumer
markets.[3]
Not surprisingly, the
same means have led, more or less, to the same end: control by an elite few,
over the minds, morality and material resources of the many.
The propaganda machine
has been (or will be) further galvanized by the implementation of State laws
for ‘compulsory’ education. The State and advocacy groups like the National
Alliance for Fundamental Right to Education (NAFRE) suggest that children and
parents are unable/incapable of making the ‘right’ decision, i.e., the decision
to go to school. If education is made compulsory, then the decision will be
made for them; they will have to follow the orders dictated to them by external
authorities. In this way, compulsion is equivalent to coercion and violence.
Parents’ and children’s freedom, flexibility, responsibility and autonomy, to
make decisions about their own learning, will first be usurped by the State,
and then altogether eliminated. What
will be used to fill the void? The
propaganda of the education machine.
Thus, the BJP and Sangh Parivar just seem to be new
characters in a very old story.[4] The plot itself — of how a select group uses
the education system to silence and disempower vast
segments of society, in order to capture their intellectual, cultural, physical
and natural gifts/talents/resources — has been repeated ad nauseam in the last 200 years.
Indeed, thought-control has been essential for curbing resistance to the
dominant system, especially when overt military-police brutality is no longer
respected. Nevertheless, I will highlight
a few of the finer points of the narrative, such as the politics/economics of
textbooks and the hidden curriculum, to illustrate how the propaganda machine
is being (and has been) operated, fueled, and re-fueled.
I will conclude this short
essay by offering some of the many possible new ‘endings’ to this old story, in
the hopes that our children and grandchildren will not have to tell, hear or
experience it again. From these new
endings, we can begin to think of new ‘beginnings’ for our children: the vivid
possibilities of them becoming co-creators of new stories for their lives.
One way to explore the
formal curriculum is through textbooks. As the manipulation of textbooks is one
of the most serious accusations leveled against the new National Curriculum
Framework, this seems to be a good place to start. Concerned parties claim that the new
textbooks are biased to serve the Hindutva interests
of the Government; they are distorting the truth. This response suggests that previous
textbooks (like the ones prepared prior to this latest installment) were
neutral, objective and accurate. But is
this correct? As Michael Apple and Linda
Christian-Smith (1991) note, textbooks are “not simply ‘delivery systems’ or
‘facts’.”[5] Rather, “textbooks…
§
are the results of political, economic, and
cultural activities, battles and compromises.”
§
are conceived, designed and authored by real
people with real interests.”
§
are published within the political and economic
constraints of markets, resources, power.”
§
signify — through their content and form — particular constructions of
reality, particular ways of selecting and organizing that vast universe of
possible knowledge.”
§
help set the canons of truthfulness and as such,
also help re-create a major reference point for what knowledge, culture,
belief, and morality really are.”
§
are really messages to and about the future.”
Apple and Smith seek
to shatter the myth that textbooks are bias-free or truth-full. Rather, it becomes clear that textbooks are
shaped by prevailing political-economic institutions, and that they, in turn,
shape the knowledge and reference points of a society. In other words, through textbooks, political
and economic forces dictate what The Truth is for societies/nations. Textbooks are thus upheld as the sacred
‘fodder’ for the sacred cow of schools. Children are taught not to question
their contents. At the same time, by
dividing information into discrete, mutually exclusive ‘subjects’, textbooks
undermine different kinds of knowledges and
meaning-making systems and negate holism in thinking/doing.[6] They inherently devalue and/or exclude other
ways of generating and sharing knowledge.
Such manipulation of
and through textbooks can be most obviously seen in the specific subject of
history.[7] As Gyanendra Pandey (1998) explains: “History, as we know it, is framed from the start by the national
project; and the nation must, by definition, have a uniform history. One consequence is that history cannot help
but demonize, or marginalize, certain aspects of the lives and conditions
(past, present, and future) of particular populations, even as it celebrates
those of others.”[8] Thus, for the purposes of building a national
identity, history textbooks present ‘good’ (the celebrated) and ‘evil’ (the
demonized) in simplistic, definitive, and often irrefutable terms. But even worse than this manipulation, is the
fact that a ‘national’ history purports to be everyone’s history. It is a mono-history, in which everyone is
expected to share the same identity, opinions, ideas, the same past, present,
and therefore, the same future. In this
way, a grand narrative of history is both used to justify the Status Quo and to
pave the way for the political-economic agendas ahead.
The micro-level
impacts of textbooks reinforce these agendas.
That is, what textbooks do to individuals and communities further
facilitates thought-control by the dominant political and economic forces. First, textbooks inculcate the worst of
combinations among the ‘schooled’: crippling laziness + intellectual
arrogance. Most students form their
understandings and make judgements based on other peoples’ interpretations;
they rarely bother to examine primary sources, or ask why the text has been
organized the way it has, its context and purpose.[9] They do not make efforts to question whether
there are other perspectives to the ‘stories’ they are reading, to grapple with
contradictions and uncertainties.
Perhaps this is
because students think that everything worth knowing has appeared in their
textbooks, or maybe because the books have been so disconnected from their
lives, that they see little value in pursuing them further. Indeed, the vast majority of college and secondary
school students in
At the same time, most
students have difficulty in critically examining a newspaper, or any mass
media. Textbooks have taught them well:
what they see must be the ‘truth’, so they do not bother to interrogate
it. Instead, they dutifully accept the
artificial, decontextualized, sound-byte reality of
the newspaper (or, better yet, of the TV),[10]
just as they do with their textbooks.
“There seems to me to be no doubt that in the
public schools the books used, especially for children, are for the most part
useless when they are not harmful.”[11] Gandhiji added yet another dimension to the impacts
textbooks have on individuals and communities: they foster a hatred for or
shame of one’s locality and a desire for things foreign. Textbooks not only diminish our ability to
see events/ideas in context, but their abstractions actually disconnect us from
context itself.[12] The more textbooks one reads, the more
education one has, the more removed one feels from his/her home, language,
work, culture, community, and the more one wants to adopt modern, Western
lifestyles and institutions. This result
perfectly matched the colonial agenda in Gandhiji’s
time, just as it perfectly matches neo-colonial agendas today.
For example, the
British sought to use the education system to “create a class of people, Indian
in blood and color, British in taste, values, morals and opinions.”[13] These colonized clerks and babus would
guarantee the administration of the country in British fashion — whether the
British were there or not.
Post-Independence, the situation repeated itself, this time via Nehru’s
urging for a technocratic, Science-worshipping, professional class — many of
whom abandoned the country for the US/UK/ Australia in the ‘brain drain’ of the
1960s-70s. Today, the National Council
for Education, Research and Training (NCERT) suggests developing ‘human assets
and resources’[14]
to propel
Of course, textbooks
are not the sole cogs in the propaganda machine. Although they enable political-economic
forces to organize/shape a society’s knowledge and ‘truth’, they could not
produce all of the desired effects on their own. Indeed, textbooks’ potency would depreciate
significantly without the hidden curriculum. It is what fuels the machine, what keeps it
running, full steam ahead. But rarely do
efforts to universalize or reform primary education (like NAFRE or NCERT)
recognize it. Instead, they fixate on
the superficial, external aspects of the education system. One might say that they are busy with the
wrapping paper on the nuclear bomb. [15]
The hidden curriculum was most
eloquently exposed by Ivan Illich in 1970, in his
scathing review of the modern institution of schooling.[16] Illich asserted
that schooling commodifies learning, making children
the consumers of abstract knowledge, the consumers of expert-led instruction
and, thus well-trained, the avid consumers of market products. Moreover, schooling cultivates a perpetual
dissatisfaction in children; there is always ‘something’ better, ‘something’ to
want, ‘something’ to gain.[17]
This consumerism and dissatisfaction are part of, what Illich
termed, the ‘hidden curriculum’ of schooling — the information, attitudes,
goals, values, etc., inculcated in children via the processes of
schooling.
The hidden curriculum is much
more powerful than the visible, national curriculum.[18] Although the latter might directly reflect
elite agendas (in the subjects chosen or the textbooks written, for example),
the former ‘programs’ children to serve the larger political economy. It develops in them the characteristics
necessary for the functioning of this system, i.e., consumerism; provisional
self-esteem[19];
a strong belief in competition, science and rationality; a near-total
dependency on and submission to experts/authorities, etc. The hidden curriculum also ensures children’s
belief in certain myths: ‘Survival of the fittest is the basis for all human
interactions;’ ‘Science and technology can solve all of our problems;’ ‘We are
free;’ ‘We fight wars to ensure peace and justice;’ etc. Wise, sensitive, and discerning eyes would
see through these statements as obvious propaganda; but rarely do the
‘schooled’ even think to question them.
Indeed, having been thoroughly indoctrinated, such questioning would
likely seem irrational, childish, even foolish!
In this way, the hidden
curriculum guarantees the birth and entrenchment of a debilitating education
‘caste system’. The more one adopts the
characteristics, beliefs and values of the education system, the higher one
ranks in the dominant political-economic order, and the less one thinks to
question or challenge it. After all, to
do so would be to doubt one’s own so-called ‘success’. The following list, prepared in 1978 by Jerry
Mander,[20]
elucidates how such thought-control can secure near-total capitulation to the
education caste system:
1) Eliminate personal knowledge. Make it hard for people to know about
themselves, how they function, what a human being is… You provide the answers
to all questions.
2) Eliminate points of comparison. …Eliminate or museum-ize
indigenous cultures, wilderness, and nonhuman life forms. Recreate internal human experience —
instincts, thoughts and spontaneous, varied feelings — so it will not evoke the
past.
3) Separate people from each other. Reduce interpersonal communication through
lifestyles that emphasize separate-ness. When people gather together, be sure
it is for a pre-arranged experience that occupies all their attention at once…
4) Unify experience, especially encouraging mental
experience at the expense of sensory experience. Separate peoples’ minds from their bodies…
thus clearing the mental channel for implantation. Idealize the mind…
5) Occupy the mind. Once people isolate their minds, fill the
brain with prearranged experience and thought.
Content is less important than the fact of the mind being filled. Free-roaming thought is to be discouraged at
all costs, because it is difficult to control.
6) Encourage drug use. …
Drugs will fill in the cracks of dissatisfaction, making people unresponsive to
organized expressions of resistance.
7) Centralize knowledge and information. Having isolated people from each other and
minds from bodies; eliminated points of comparison; discouraged sensory
experience; and invented technologies to unify and control experience, [then
you] speak. At this point, whatever [is said] from the outside will enter
directly into all brains with great power and believability.
8) Redefine happiness and the meaning of life in
terms of new and increasingly unrooted philosophy. …Anything makes sense in a void. All channels are open, receptive and
unquestioning. Formal mind structuring is simple…
Mander was using these conditions to explain why
television should be eliminated. But try applying them to what schooling is and
does today. What the curriculum (both
hidden and visible) does. What textbooks
do. How schooling relates to a larger
global economy, bent on profits and dependent on rampant, parasitic
consumerism. How it fuels the propaganda
machine and its projects of nation-building, nuclearization,
industrialization, ICT-ization — all on our way to
Progress. How it breaks up families and
communities by first breaking down other ways of learning, making-meaning,
relating, living; and then replacing them with the readymade products/schemes
of the Market and State. How most of the
‘products’ of schooling behave in society: with greed, self-indulgence,
arrogance, ignorance, animosity, etc.
What Should We Talk About Then?
Shouldn’t we in
A Spirit of Questioning is crucial for liberating us
from the propaganda machine in several different ways. First, we can begin to
question the purpose, functioning and implications of existing institutions,
like the State, Market, etc., and their instruments of thought-control. For example, Critical Media Awareness starts
by deeply questioning Media sources, their messages, their effect on us,
etc. By doing this, we concentrate on
what we are being told, why we are being told it, and who benefits/loses from
our believing it. Critical Media
Awareness reduces our passivity and complacency towards the massive Media
machine; by questioning and then creating our own media, we become more
conscientious, more discerning, and therefore less gullible and less
manipulated.
Second, we can begin to frame
and pose our own questions.[21] Perhaps the most important of these questions
is, “Why?” (“How?” follows as a close second).
In and of itself, articulating our own questions radically challenges
schooling, curriculum and textbooks (our prior sources of questions — and
answers). It is the hallmark of
self-motivation; whatever sparks our curiosity and interests acts as the source
of and impetus for our learning.
While many of our questions may
not have one ‘right’ answer, or even an ‘answer’ at all, the very processes of
reflecting on, sharing, and engaging with our own questions paves the way for
innumerable new understandings and insights.
Questioning leads us to forsake readymade ideas and products and to
embark on a discovery of the mysteries of life, of the world around us, of
ourselves. This profound respect for the
‘unknown’ not only builds our immunity against the propaganda machine (we stop
looking to it for all the answers), but it also reawakens our imaginations, our
sense of wonder, and our faith in dynamic possibilities. As J. Krishnamurti
reminds us, “While we are young is the
time to be discontented, not only with ourselves, but with the things about us…
Discontent is the means to freedom… It
is the burning desire to inquire, and not the easy imitation of the multitude,
that will bring about a new understanding of the ways of life.” [22]
A Spirit of Practical Wisdom diminishes the
power/value of abstract knowledge, rote and disconnected information, and
reaffirms holistic, contextualized living and knowing. Practical wisdom was what Gandhiji
had emphasized: the concrete use of one’s head, hands, and heart for working
with dignity, for building relationships, for understanding one’s life in the
world, and, ultimately, for realizing Swaraj. Practical
wisdom is what we gain when we trust our common sense; when we situate
ourselves in a unique context, make serious observations/explorations/
experiments, and derive meaning from them.[23] Vinoba Bhave said it simply, “Education is a by-product of
practical work.”[24]
We are fortunate in the
sub-continent to have a vast repertoire of practical wisdom; regenerating such
a spirit is more possible here, than in many ‘developed’ places. But to do so,
we need to resist dehumanizing labels — like ‘backward’, ‘illiterate’,
‘unscientific’, ‘first generation learners’ — which means we need to deflate
our over-inflated egos. Instead, we must begin to appreciate and celebrate the
situated and nuanced knowledges that grow from our
diverse contexts, crafts, languages, expressions, values, as well as from our
relationships to nature, senses of the divine, the cosmos, etc.[25] Practical wisdom enables us to cultivate our
sensitivity, compassion, self- and mutual respect, and to nurture our own
understandings of justice, freedom, and democracy. These are not blindly memorized from
esoteric, abstract textbooks, but rather are rooted in the vibrant, organic
soils of our life-works.
A Spirit of Life Expressions can mean the death of autocracy and the rebirth
of our selves and communities. Life
expressions are the ways by which we understand and share our relationships
with nature, our cultures, languages, and with each other. They foster vital social linkages of trust,
love and interdependence. To express
ourselves, we act and interact with one another; we dialogue and reflect on our
experiences together. At the same time,
life expressions utilize and enhance individuals’ diverse learning styles,
wisdoms, intelligences, talents, potentials, etc. Examples of expressions include: painting,
playing, making music, planting and harvesting, embroidering, writing/speaking
poetry, making pottery, dancing, going for nature walks, weaving, celebrating
festivals, acting in dramas…
Unlike
the products of schooling, life expressions cannot be labeled, ranked, tested,
measured, competed for, punished, or rewarded.
The elimination of external comparison — and also of spatial and
temporal limits — means that no one individual or institution can control
expressions, nor determine their value.
They are infinitely open to all of us.
Life expressions come from the heart and are honest and faithful to our
experiences, convictions, our life and inner self. It is through expressions that we can begin
to know who we are and what we have the potential to become.[26] Rabindranath Tagore is among the Indian visionaries, who articulated
this most clearly: “Creation is for
itself; it expresses our very being… It is something which is ultimate; it is
for the realization of our own spirit which is free, which is glad… In love, in
goodness, man himself is revealed…”[27]
* * * * * * *
All
Apffel-Marglin, Frederique, ed. The Spirit of Regeneration.
Apple, M. and Linda K.
Christian-Smith, eds. The Politics of the Textbook.
Bhave, Vinoba. Thoughts on Education.
Freire,
Paulo. Pedagogy of the Oppressed.
__________. Pedagogy of
Hope.
__________. Learning to
Question: A Pedagogy of Liberation.
Gandhi, Mohandas K. Towards
New Education. Ahmedabad: Navjivan
Press, 1953.
Holt, John. Instead of Education.
Illich, Ivan.
Deschooling Society.
Jain, Shilpa.
“Worlds Apart: Gandhiji’s Nai
Talim vs. NCERT’s National
Curriculum Framework for School Education”.
Kohn, Alfie.
Punished by Rewards.
Krishnamurti, J. Education
and the Significance of Life.
Kumar,
Mander,
Jerry. Four Arguments for the Elimination of Television. Goa: Other India Press, 1998 ed.
Macauley, Lord.
Minutes on Education, 1835. Available in Dharampal.
Despoliation and Defaming of India. Goa: Other
India Press, 1999.
National Council for Education, Research and
Training (NCERT). National Curriculum Framework for School Education
(draft). New Delhi: NCERT, 2000.
Pandey, Gyanendra. “The Culture of History”, in Nicholas B. Dirks,
ed. In Near Ruins: Cultural Theory at
the End of the Century. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota, 1998.
PROBE team. Public Report On
Basic Education (PROBE) in India. New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1999.
Rampton,
Sheldon and John Stauber. Trust Us, We’re Experts!
New York: Penguin Putnam, 2001.
Scott, James. Seeing Like a
State. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998.
Tagore, Rabindranath. Lectures
and Addresses. New Delhi: Macmillan, 1953.
Notes
More on The Culture
of Schooling...
1) Labels, ranks and sorts human beings. It
creates a rigid social hierarchy consisting of a small elite class of ‘highly
educated’ and a large lower class of ‘failures’ and ‘illiterates’, based on
levels of school achievement.
2) Imposes uniformity and
standardization. It propagates the
viewpoint that diversity is a problem, which must be removed if society is to
progress.
3) Spreads fear, insecurity, violence and
silence through its externally-imposed, military-like discipline.
4) Forces human beings to violently compete
against each other over scarce resources in rigid win-lose situations.
5) Confines the motivation for learning to
examinations, certificates and jobs. It suppresses all non-school motivations
to learn and kills desire to engage in critical self-evaluation. It centralizes
control over learning processes with the State-Market nexus, taking power away
from individuals/communities.
6) Commodifies all
human beings, Nature, knowledge and social relationships. They are to be extracted, exploited, bought
and sold.
7) Fragments and compartmentalizes knowledge,
human beings and the natural world. It
de-links knowledge from wisdom, practical experiences and specific contexts.
8) Artificially separates human rationality
from human emotions and the human spirit. It imposes a single view of
rationality and logic on all people, while simultaneously devaluing many other
knowledge systems.
9) Privileges literacy (in a few elite
languages) over all other forms of human expression and creation. It drives
people to distrust their local languages. It prioritizes newspapers, textbooks,
television as the only reliable sources of information. These forms of
State-Market controlled media cannot be questioned by the general public.
10) Reduces the
spaces and opportunities for ‘valid’ human learning by demanding that they all
be funneled through a centrally-controlled institution. It creates artificial
divisions between learning and home, work, play, spirituality.
11) Destroys the
dignity of labor; devalues the learning that takes place through manual work.
12) Breaks
intergenerational bonds of family and community and increases people’s
dependency on the Nation-State and Government, on Science and Technology, and
on the Market for livelihood and identity.
[1] Some groups, like All India Save Education
Committee, convey both perspectives, in their calls for “secular, scientific,
democratic education”. See their
pamphlet “Resist Commoditisation and Saffronisation of Education: Rise Against the Mounting
Onslaught” (July 2000).
[2] Propaganda was perhaps best described by Edward Bernays, the ‘father of public relations’. In his book Propaganda (1928), he
wrote: “The conscious and intelligent manipulation of the organized habits and
opinions of the masses is an important element in democratic society. Those who manipulate this mechanism of
society constitute an invisible government, which is the true ruling power of
our country. We are governed, our minds
molded, our tastes formed, our ideas suggested, largely by men we have never
heard of. This is a logical result of the way in which our democratic society
is organized. Vast numbers of human
beings must cooperate in this manner if they are to live together as a smoothly
functioning society…” Quoted in S. Rampton and J. Stauber. Trust Us, We’re Experts! New York: Penguin
Putnam, 2001.
[3] Notice that the Education System has never been
in the hands of ‘regular’ people, much less in the hands of children
themselves. It was never set up as such,
and so we should not expect it to be.
But thankfully, what is still in all of our hands is our individual
learning and collective wisdom.
[4] Indeed, at various points of time, a similar
debate has raged in Israel-Palestine, Japan, Germany, the United States, etc.
[5] Michael W. Apple and Linda K. Christian-Smith.
“The Politics of the Textbook,” in The Politics of the Textbook. London:
Routledge, 1991.
[6] The Yash Pal
Committee’s “Report of Learning Without Burden” (1992-93) reaffirms this
assessment of textbooks: The textbook “is not
perceived as one of the resources for learning about a subject but as the only authoritative resource. … Teachers
see it as a body of ‘truths’ which children must learn by heart. … The most
common message that children get from textbooks is that the life ordinary
people live is ‘wrong’ or irrational.” (Emphasis theirs.)
[7] Other subjects can be manipulated as well, even
so-called ‘objective’ sciences like biology, engineering, and computers. This is accomplished primarily through biases
in content (towards outdated Newtonian science, for example).
[8] Gyanendra Pandey. “The Culture of History”, In Near Ruins:
Cultural Theory at the End of the Century. Nicholas B. Dirks, Editor. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press,
1998.
[9] How most students interpret Gandhiji
is an obvious example of this. They form
their opinions of him, his ideas and lifework, based on hearsay or on short
anecdotes in their textbooks, which are usually second- and third-hand
interpretations. Rarely do they read,
much less deeply reflect on, his original writings. This lack of intellectual
action and effort thus perpetuates the stereotypes of Gandhiji
as idealistic, obsolete, unrealistic, etc.
[10] This is an obvious link between textbooks and the
mass media generally: both use one-way transmission to ‘send’ information to
passive receivers, who quickly learn to slavishly rely on them for the
‘truth’.
[11] From Harijan, January 12, 1933. Quoted in M.K. Gandhi. Towards
New Education. Ahmedabad: Navjivan,
1953.
[12] Chapter Six of the Public Report On Basic
Education (PROBE) in India (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1999)
highlights such problems with textbooks: dense ‘packaging’ of obscure
information; distanced from real life; urban, elite biases; simplistic script;
stereotyped characters; moralizing/ preaching; disjointed info-glut; didactic;
etc. For more details, see Krishna
Kumar’s Social Character of Learning (New Delhi: Sage Publications,
1989).
[13] The oft-quoted sentiments of British Lord Macauley, from his Minutes on Education, 1835.
[14] The first sentence of the first page of the draft
of NCERT’s National Curriculum Framework for
School Education (2000) states: “… a human being is a positive asset and
precious national resource, which needs to be cherished, nurtured, and
developed with tenderness and care coupled with dynamism.”
[15] Proclaimed desires for quality education should
also be suspect. As John Holt (1976) said, “Quality education for every child
is an absurdity, a contradiction in terms. Most parents, when they say to S-chools, ‘Give my kid a quality education,’ they mean, ‘Do
something to him that will get him ahead of all the other kids.’ …They mean,
make him a winner in a race where most kids lose…”
[16] Ivan Illich. Deschooling Society. London: Marion Boyars,
1970.
[17] ‘Something’ could be taken literally (a material
object) or figuratively (a nameless, faceless emptiness or longing).
[18] Though this is equally worthy of critique. See my article “Worlds Apart: Gandhiji’s Nai Talim vs. NCERT’s National
Curriculum Framework for School Education” (2000), available on
<www.swaraj.org/shikshantar>.