Wrong excisions for right reason: Draft National Education Policy 2019

In the draft National Education Policy 2019 report submitted by the Kasturirangan Committee to the Union HRD ministry on May 30, the power of the Delhi-based National Council of Educational Research & Training (NCERT) to “shrink the curriculum content in each subject to its core,” has been substantially expanded. Ditto SCERTs (State Councils of Educational Research and Training). But recent NCERT curriculum changes suggested by the council to lighten students’ syllabus load arouse apprehension that the subjects it proposes to drop are the wrong ones. For instance, the council has removed three chapters from the class IX social science textbook titled India and the Contemporary World-I. The three chapters are ‘Clothing: A Social History’, ‘History and Sport: The Story of Cricket’ and ‘Peasants and Farmers’. These omissions are ill-advised as the chapters on the history of sports and history of clothing shed light on critical time periods of struggle and social reforms. The latter gives an account of the apparel norms and ideas of beauty that existed in England, Europe and the United States and the reforms introduced to liberate women from strait-laced norms. This chapter details how apparel and dress defined the identity of women and traces the history of dress reform. Further it narrates clothing and dress transformations in India while connecting them to stringent caste-based dress codes — e.g, prohibiting lower caste women from covering the upper part of their torsos, using umbrellas or wearing shoes or gold ornaments — most strictly imposed upon Nadar caste women by the Malabar region’s (contemporary Kerala’s) dominant castes, especially the Nair community. It details the struggle of Nadar women to cover their bodies and the stance of the British Raj government which issued a proclamation to this effect but limited their right to cover their upper body “in any manner whatever, but not like women of high caste”. Likewise, the chapter on history of cricket delineates colonial history and how religious communalism and caste politics permeated this popular game. It traces the development of cricket, highlighting the exclusion of girls and women from all sports, and the link between race, religion and cricket. And chapter 6 focuses on peasants and farmers by discussing the agricultural revolution and its impact on India. It is submitted in the draft National Education Policy 2019 that deleting these histories from senior school textbooks will not only erase the history of these important liberation movements, it will also deprive students of knowledge about how new norms emerged in marginalised communities and translated into new rights and freedoms for women. For any discipline to evolve, history provides lessons and explanations of how social rights and dignity are won. In the past, national policies on curriculum were drafted bearing these objectives in mind. For instance, National Education Policy 1986 prescribed a national curriculum based on the realisation of constitutional rights and objectives and a detailed PoA (programme of action) which stressed the relevance, flexibility and quality founded on the values of justice and equality. The National Curriculum…