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From
Tehelka Magazine, Vol 9, Issue 31, Dated 04 Aug 2012 |
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| OPINION |
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CARTOON CONTROVERSY |
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No humour in uniform
The Thorat Committee set up after the cartoon contoversy seems afraid of a key educational building block: a doubting mind
Apoorvanand, Social Commentator
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Illustration: Anand Naorem |
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THE THORAT Committee set up by the National Council of Educational Research and Training (NCERT) to identify “educationally inappropriate” material in its social science textbooks has produced an actionable report. It is a different matter that the action is largely in the form of deletions or modification of “negative”, “ambiguous” or “politically or socially sensitive” cartoons. In fact, the report’s obsession with cartoons leads its reader to believe that the committee was asked to review the cartoons in the textbooks, only to be shocked to find that the word ‘cartoon’ does not exist in its terms of reference. The committee had a much larger mandate. However, the only effective recommendation it makes is: removal of some cartoons; change in the note below the Unni and Munni cartoons to bring clarity and improvement in the message; and removal of some Unni and Munni cartoons.
It is true that the demand by MPs of all parties to remove certain cartoons from the textbooks and punish those responsible for including them forced Union HRD Minister Kapil Sibal to announce that the NCERT would be asked to form a committee to look into the matter. However, a careful reading of the proceedings of the parliamentary debates on this issue shows that the minister resisted demands by the lawmakers and also did not succumb to the desk-thumping call by his party president to remove entire textbooks. Not only did he not announce any immediate action against the books or the textbook committee, which would have undoubtedly secured the assent of Parliament in that feverish moment, his ministry also took care that the limited autonomy of the NCERT was not infringed upon. Contrary to popular perception, it was not the HRD ministry but the NCERT that chose the members of the committee. All this needs to be said only to bring home the point that the committee had all the autonomy to discuss what constitutes as “educationally inappropriate” material in the textbooks. It was perhaps an opportunity to strengthen the deliberative space that was threatened by the uninformed debate in Parliament. It could have given our legislators and others some time and tools to do some reflection and rethinking and to examine their impulses. Unfortunately, the report does not demonstrate this educational ambition. John Dewey, the great American educationist, says that one of the chief functions of education is to delay action and encourage people to stop and think so as to not fall prey to their impulses. The committee, on the contrary, hastens action rather than delay it.
It would have been logical for the committee to define the term “educationally inappropriate” to rationalise its findings and recommendations. It would have also helped had the committee heard Fulbright scholar Rohit Shetty, who says that one way to define the term “educationally inappropriate” in the context of textbooks or any other educational material is to see whether it is educative or miseducative. According to Dewey, anything that hardens the hearts of the children, or makes them follow the old beaten path, or produces a careless attitude in them or fails to help them make connections between different thoughts and ideas, is potentially miseducative. A miseducative educational tool either hampers the growth of the deliberative power of the child or distorts it. One fails to understand as to why did the committee not ask this basic question, “What does ‘educationally inappropriate’ mean?”
The words that stand out in this report are “sensitivity”, “positive and negative message” and “ambiguity”. One need not say education isn’t about respecting or deferring to group sensitivities. However, it is ultimately much more about understanding them and on many occasions even questioning or critiquing them. Sharan Kumar Limbale, in his book Hindu, narrates an incident about a lesson on Ambedkar being taught in a class. The villagers get excited as they hear this news and storm the classroom. Threatening the guruji for having dared to teach this lesson, they ask the children to tear the page on Ambedkar from the textbook as they cannot bear even the thought of their children coming in contact with the name of Ambedkar.
Obviously, their communitarian sensibilities had been hurt. Does that justify their act of forcibly deleting the “offending” section on Ambedkar in the textbook? We expect our textbooks, along with other curricular activities, to be so designed as to give us strength to examine all these sensitivities, and ways to deal with them rather than kneeling down before the sensitivity of the day.
The committee also fails to appreciate the desire of the new political science textbooks to move away from the old ‘civics’ mode. They do not seek to create obedient or good citizens who never question the State. They aspire to inculcate a questioning spirit in the children, nurture in them a true sense of the term, a “doubting mind”. Therefore, they do not burden themselves with the task of keeping children away from negative influences. They also do not think that it is their job to convey any particular message to the children. They are designed in a manner to help them ask their own questions and discover their individual responses. It is not the job of the textbooks to be vessels of positive messages from the ruling political idea of the State while teachers are treated as mere messengers.
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It is again the same old mindset, which trusts neither the young minds nor the teachers |
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IT WOULD have helped the committee a lot had it interacted with members of different textbook committees to understand the implication of making the notion of “negative and positive messages” a yardstick to assess textbook material. In a recent Sanskrit textbook committee meeting, the facts of social reformer Ramabai’s conversion to Christianity and her marriage under the Civil Marriage Act were sought to be omitted as the dominant view in the committee was that this information would impact children negatively and lead them astray. Similarly, the inclusion of nonsense rhymes in literature textbooks was criticised as it was thought to be a meaningless verbal activity and therefore useless for a language classroom. One can easily see an instrumentalist mind at work here that wants young minds programmed to receive only the “useful and positive messages” and filter out all “negative and useless messages”.
Another interesting question the committee asks is whether “the lessons focus only on analysis or on synthesis also”. One fails to understand this anxiety of striking a balance between analysis and synthesis. Is “analysis” negative and “synthesis” positive?
Fear of ambiguity is another feature of the report. Cartoons, captions and sentences deemed ambiguous are sought to be dropped. It is again the same old mindset, which trusts neither the young minds nor the teachers. That they can deal with ambiguity, negotiate the grey areas on their own is something the committee cannot accept. By doing this, it is withdrawing the agency the teachers were sought to be given by the new textbooks with their open-endedness as a well-thought-out curricular strategy.
The report is a product of a statist mind that took shape in the 1970s. The era of Emergency created an ethos of self-censorship in the intellectual world. Positivity was also the word of that period. It won’t be out of place to remember that the Stalinist State sentenced many to oblivion for not being positive enough towards the State.
It is not at all surprising that “constructivism” and “critical pedagogy”, two key terms of the National Curriculum Framework, 2005, do not find space in this report. Since the report believes in the binary of “positive and negative”, the possibility of “critical” escapes it completely.
Apoorvanand teaches Hindi at Delhi University
letters@tehelka.com
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