The Rhetoric, Routine and Ruse of a Regime: The Case of NCERT
Maitrayee Chaudhuri | 25 August 2023 | The Wire
Representative photo of the cover of 'India and the Contemporary World – I,' the History textbook for Class 11.
The National Council of Education Research and Training (NCERT) has been in the news. In July 2023, an NCERT notification announced a 19-member panel to finalise textbooks and learning materials for schools under the National Education Policy (NEP) 2020. Celebrity mathematicians, musicians, sports personnel along with a host of big names constitute the committee. Whether due process was followed or not is not quite the point, for this has long been replaced by a culture of ordinances. Both due process and accountability, whether in matters of state functioning or in the matter of knowledge production, are dispensable. This announcement, therefore, needs to be placed in a larger context of a certain approach, with a particular design and messaging, that the regime has mastered. g. For, as we are told, everything is about ‘perceptions’.