Cleansing the Past, Creating the Future? Do (History) Books Matter?
Kumkum Roy | 03 May 2023 | The India Forum
Photo: Eugen Hultzsch, Corpus Inscriptionum Indicarum, Volume 1: Inscriptions of Asoka (1925).
The past few weeks have witnessed discussions on a process that school textbooks prepared by the National Council of Educational Research and Training (NCERT) have been subjected to.
Designated as a process of ‘rationalisation’ – another euphemism added to the many that we have grown accustomed to – it is apparently inspired by a set of principles. These are removing content that overlaps, doing away with material considered difficult, removing material that the learner can acquire through self-learning, and doing away with what is ‘irrelevant’. These principles are wide-ranging enough to deal with very diverse exigencies.