Leave the schools alone

Late last month, a Kannada textbook for the eighth grade had people rolling on the floor and laughing after it claimed that Hindutva ideologue Vinayak Damodar Savarkar often flew out of prison on a bird while he was lodged in the Andamans jail.

Some folks claimed that the parable was metaphoric and not literal, but the context of that story didn’t seem to suggest that at all: The author leads by describing Savarkar’s prison cell, which he says lacked even a keyhole. “But still,” he narrates, “somehow bulbul birds used to come flying into the cell, and sitting on their wings, Savarkar used to visit his motherland every day.”

Insofar as the cult of glorification of a personality goes, that chapter should rank amongst the world’s best. But how convincing is it really? Over the years, many countries have dabbled and experimented with the right proportion of fact and fantasy in cultivating the most sustainable and compelling personality cults.

In Russia, kindergarten kids once made a cartoon — supervised by their teacher — that showed President Vladimir Putin wrestling with a brown bear and flipping it over his head with his bare hands. China’s Xi Jinping has generally taken a more serious approach — infusing his “Xi Jinping Thought” into the school curriculum. But occasionally, even his propaganda efforts have bordered on the frivolous. Four years ago, he banned a film featuring Winnie the Pooh because — well, simply put — he looks like him. More recently, he pulled out George Orwell’s books on authoritarianism off the syllabus, with incredible amounts of self-implicating irony.

Yet, the unchallenged gold medallist in propaganda and indoctrination is inarguably North Korea. Schoolchildren in that country are taught that Kim Jong-il — father of the reigning Kim Jong-un — was born atop the sacred Paektu Mountain, under a double rainbow and a glowing new star which heralded his coming (in reality, Kim Jong-il had been born in a small Siberian village). His official biography also claimed that his body was so well calibrated that he never had to urinate or defecate!

But as hilarious as these stories might sound, centralised and unaccountable control over the education system can also be used for more sinister purposes. In the aftermath of the Ukraine invasion, for instance, Putin has used the Russian school system to teach young children a falsified version of history and mould them into warmongers. One Kremlin bureaucrat recently told thousands of teachers at an online workshop that their job is literally to “infect them with our ideology.”

Meanwhile, Turkey’s Recep Tayyip Erdogan has turned what was previously one of the Muslim world’s most secular education systems into a fervent Islamist factory. Last year, a study of 28 new Turkish textbooks by a Jerusalem-based research institute found that public school students in that country are taught that jihad is a responsibility for every good Muslim and that veiling is “an order of Allah.”

The dangers of a centralised and corrupted education system are not difficult to see. It ruins scientific temper and the ability to think critically (in fact, in most cases, that’s exactly what they are designed to do: to kill critical thinking and thereby all political opposition). And in the long run, that means that the country’s population is unable to invent, innovate or create — leaving it a mediocre economy at best, and a failed State at worst.

But in the case of silly and demonstrably exaggerated stories such as bear-wrestling and bird-riding, one also has to wonder: how are kids supposed to take school seriously if it teaches them such trash?