New Delhi: Keeping the accomplishments of the Indian civilisation across the millennia out of the view of students would be the “wrong ideology”, Michel Danino, chairperson of NCERT’s curricular area group on social science, said in conversation with ThePrint.
Danino, who is a visiting professor in the humanities and social sciences department at IIT Gandhinagar, said that English is put on a pedestal and people’s obsession with English-medium schools must gradually disappear.
His comments were in response to a question on what his opinion was on allegations that the National Curriculum Framework (NCF)’s recommendations to include the Indian knowledge system in the curriculum and to impart education in Indian languages are political, and a push to promote a certain ideology.
“Textbook development works with complete freedom. Never have there been requests for withdrawals or what must go in. That never happened. So, there is no political pressure. Definitely not. Never once were we told that this has to go (in the textbooks)…Keeping the accomplishments of the Indian civilisation across the millennia out of the view of students would be a wrong ideology,” he said.
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‘Unnatural situation’
Danino said that he has witnessed an “unnatural situation” in India in the past when content related to Indian culture, heritage and philosophies was not incorporated in the country’s education system.
“I have not just been recommending for maybe 25 or even 30 years, but rather witnessing the unnatural situation in India, where the Indian content, you know, the content of Indian culture, Indian heritage, Indian text, Indian philosophies and Indian knowledge systems of all kinds in the education system are almost nil, both at school and higher education levels. I am surprised that this recommendation did not come earlier. I think India wasted a lot of time. It would have been much easier to plan this a few years after independence,” he said.
He added that there is a wealth of knowledge in the ancient Indian way of thinking and ancient Indian disciplines, which is admired by scholars from across the world.
“From architecture to governance to medicine to mathematics to, of course, literature, of course philosophy, spirituality and so on and so forth. So this is what is called Indian knowledge systems…The emphasis is not that Indian school children should become scholars in Indian knowledge systems. That is obviously not possible, not desirable either, but that they should be exposed to those cultural roots that are very enriching, and you know, are not something that belong exclusively to the past,” Danino said.
Emphasising that in almost every field, one can find some relevance of the ancient knowledge systems, he said, “It is not a return to the past. It is rather using the past to enrich the present, and sometimes to offer new perspectives, new ways of thinking, new solutions.”
‘English cannot be abandoned’
Danino is also a member of the committee that drafted the NCF 2023, based on which new NCERT textbooks are developed. This year, the NCERT has released the social science textbook for class 6 in line with the new NCF.
Commenting on the NCF’s recommendation to teach in regional languages and to introduce an extra Indian language in classes 9 to 12, Danino clarified that there is no question of imposing any particular language, and English can also not be abandoned as it is a “very important international language”.
“But at the same time, it should not have the centrality that it has or the prestige that it has. There are surveys after surveys to prove that it handicapped us by being compelled to learn what remains, at the end of the day, a foreign language.”
“But the philosophy is that there should be more centrality to the Indian languages while English remains, and in fact, there are options also for other foreign languages…The fact that English is on a pedestal and that people remain obsessed with English-medium schools should be eroded gradually. It will not happen in a year or two,” he said.
‘NCF has bolts and nuts of NEP’s implementation’
Highlighting that several attempts have been made in the past to change school education, Danino said, “I remember myself having witnessed the 1986 National Policy on Education. And then there was one in 2005, a new curriculum framework and so on and so forth. So, there have been many times and they have achieved partial successes, but by and large, they failed to really change the system.”
He added: “Now, this attempt, based on the New Education Policy 2020, is very different. The central philosophy, if you like, is not that different from the 1986 National Policy on Education. There are lots of commonalities because world over, what good school education means is reasonably well understood. But still, there are a lot of structural and important details which make a big difference.”
He said that the comparison of the new NCERT class 6 social science textbook with the previous versions of the textbook should not be done. “It’s like comparing a textbook in German in Germany with a textbook in Japan. Perhaps you don’t do that. There’s no point comparing the new textbooks with the old, whether in social science or mathematics. And so the whole approach, the whole foundation is completely different. The syllabus is different.”
“So, we are talking about an attempt which is absolutely a clean slate. There are many features in this textbook which try to really implement the philosophy spelled out in the NCF for school education more than the NEP, because the NCF is really what contains the bolts and nuts of the implementation of the NEP.”
(Edited by Radifah Kabir)
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