Textbook revisions will hit lower-income students the hardest
Parvati Sharma | 10 June 2023 | The Times of India
Every day brings further details of deletions from NCERT textbooks that have been ‘rationalised’, it is said, to reduce the academic burden on schoolchildren post-Covid. The rationale of the exercise is unclear. India has the dubious distinction of having had one of the world’s longest school shutdowns during the pandemic – almost two years – during which only a small fraction of students could afford to attend online classes. Despite warnings of the adverse effects of such prolonged lack of access to schooling – particularly on low-income students – little was done to correct matters. It makes equally little sense, now, for the NCERT to offer this reduced syllabus to students after the pandemic is past: when schools were closed, millions of children received no education at all; now that they are open, they are to receive rather less than more of it.
The specific deletions are worrying, too. Much has been written on the removal of an entire chapter dealing with Mughal rule. Other Muslim kings and dynasties occupy similarly reduced space. History is not static by any means; its methods and focus change with every generation. If the NCERT had chosen to replace dynasties with their subjects – with the histories of everyday people – its revisions might have sparked a more useful, even progressive debate. But it isn’t only Muslim kings who are being excised from textbooks, but also chapters on social movements and people’s struggles (including agrarian movements and struggles for the rights of forest dwellers, the Narmada Bachao Andolan, the history of the Dalit Panthers, etc.)