AAP govt's clamp on textbook contents

Slashing 25 per cent lessons from each text, the government instructed schools to respond in five days.

When the people of Delhi brought Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) back to power with absolute majority, denying the BJP and the Congress any role whatsoever in local governance, they were full of high, obviously unrealistic, hopes. They thought and with some reason (having witnessed some radical measures of AAP in its last tenure) that they will now wake up soon to find all their problems resolved.

The poor were deeply disappointed as the days passed by. The lower middle and middle classes were completely shaken when somebody like Yogendra Yadav was declared persona non grata. The party seemed to be cracking from within. As the pressure from the BJP via the LG grew in strength, people started losing all hopes. Many substantive issues appeared against several AAP MLAs.

But the unkindest cut of all has come from the minister and bureaucrats looking after the education system of Delhi. Education, being the locus of transmission of existing knowledge and a site for the creation of new, is crucial for a societal transformation.

 For reasons best known to them, the Delhi government suddenly decided to slash 25 per cent lessons from each text.  In fact, people initially thought that all this must have been planned by some hacker who wished to show the AAP in the image of BJP! But no, we soon received images of suggested cuts and signed copies of the order to all schools to respond within five days in a prescribed format and in a word limit not exceeding 150 words.

It was not even thought desirable to constitute a consultative body involving people who conceptualised and created those textbooks or to consult those who created the curriculum that motivated these textbooks. There is indeed no finality or sacredness about them.

Textbook is only one component of the whole pedagogical process and like all the others such as the teacher, classroom transactions, infrastructure etc constantly needs to be improved. Yet, it all looked mad, coming from AAP. But with a method as Yadav also suggests.

It appears it was decided to delete 25 per cent from each textbook in the mathematical proportion of one poem, one story and one essay from each book, two of each of any of them to make the number of deletions for or five. Consider the case of poems in the Hindi textbooks of Classes 6, 7 and 8.

One thing is clear, whatever be their social or political motivations for deleting a specific poem, the reasons given for deleting them prove beyond any doubt that the people handling this task of mutilation have no idea either about children’s learning potential or about what poetry is all about.

Children come to school with a full blown language, often with a multiplicity of languages. They also come equipped with a huge cognitive potential and a diversity of learning strategies. The fact that our education systems fail to capitalise on them is an indicator of our failures and not the other way round.

Difficulty level

All the comments given for the deletion of poems are highly instrumental in nature; they should be useful, we are told, and not deal with abstract ideas, emotions or philosophical issues. If poetry does not deal with these, what worth is that poetry? And children by the age of 11 or so, learn to handle all kinds of complex issues; parents and teachers are often not even aware of them. Friends often are.

I am not going to talk about the actual poems at all. Before one picks up an axe to chop, one does need to do a lot of work to ask: Is it good poetry? Is it within the cognitive potential of the child? Will it enrich her social, emotional, ethical and spiritual world? One of the poems deleted from Class 6 is called chand se thorii sii gappen. The reasons for deletion: ‘No specific utility. Other poems are more effective for grammar’.

All poets would turn in their graves; those living would look back at their work and might say: ‘What is the utility of my poetry? Did I write it so that it could be used for teaching grammar.’ One listens to or reads poetry because it elevates one to a different level of existence. Dhwani is deleted from Class 8 because ‘both language and emotion of the poem are difficult and far above the level of students’.

How does one measure the difficulty level of an emotion? Does anyone in the ‘deletion committee’ know how to measure the difficulty level of language of poetry? And who has undertaken the exercise of measuring the language proficiency levels and emotional contours of 14 year olds to chop off a poem in this manner.

There is an assumption that what has been said in prose need not be repeated in poetry! A lot of poetry or prose will never get written if one were to follow that logic. That’s the reason given for deleting van ke marg me from Class 6: ‘Content deals with forest experiences of Ram and Seeta. This is dealt with elsewhere also.’

(The writer is retired professor, Delhi University)