A ‘position paper’ to echo a master narrative

The position paper (PP no 4: Education in Social Sciences), commissioned and put-out by the Department of School Education, Research and Training (DSERT), is a double-tongued one. It raises pertinent administrative and institutional issues that are required to promote social science teaching in schools but ultimately succumbs to the epidemic of intellectual and political sycophancy that has gripped Karnataka. Instead of providing scope for an engaged social science that can contribute to empathetic awareness and social commensality, the report parrots the keywords of NEP 2020.

The report is not wrong in challenging the Western-centric orientation of social sciences in India. Yet, it fails to articulate what can be a genuine and viable non-European or non-America-centric body of social science knowledge.

If it were to follow its own criteria, will it recognise Ibn Khaldun, the 14th century thinker, as a pioneering social science scholar whose ideas of community, identity, knowledge and power are appropriate for understanding India? If there must be Indian culture-centric social science curricula, why has the report not recognised the invaluable body of writings by Tagore and Ambedkar that could provide perspectives into the complexities of India?

Will the pluralism that was upheld by various Kannada writers, from Kuvempu to Rahmath Tarikere and others, be allowed to be part of the social science curricula? And, will it make space for Akkamahadevi or Pandita Ramabhai and their articulations that questioned brahminical patriarchy?

The report’s most glaring deficit is in its failure to reckon with identifying key social institutions such as the caste system, both as mind-set and as institution, as continuing to be the foundational bases of our hierarchical society. Not only does it not mention the need to question such a system in which discrimination and humiliation are built-in, but it seeks to thrust upon us a subservient approach to accepting all traditions as valid.

Although the paper calls for recognising and building on ‘experiential learning’, it fails to highlight how our very diverse society can be understood through the lens of cultural pluralism.

The position paper trips on its own contradictions. It cites the importance of the Constitution and its values, but missing in this elaboration are terms and concepts such as democracy, secularism, justice, equity, and other progressive ideas that can facilitate the making of a humane and decent society.

Instead, the position paper draws on NEP 2020’s orientation and calls for concepts such as atman, moksha, bhakti, jati, baradari, etc., to be taught as central ideas of social science. Further, the paper goes on to insist that these ‘Indian terms’ should not be translated and should be retained and taught as they are. At the same time, what are considered to be non-Indian concepts, such as religion, salvation, grace, divinity and sovereignty are to be retained as English terms!

What the report is seeking to do is to negate the very foundation of social science understanding, which is to enable not only comparative perspectives but to also foster new ideas and perspectives that can enhance any society.

The paper calls for developing a ‘critical consciousness’ but goes on to make statements such as “The very nature of social sciences has been to develop disrespect and contempt to (sic) their traditions and the way of existence of human beings in Indian situation” (page 2). The paper calls for shlokas to be taught to primary schoolchildren and at the secondary level students are to be introduced to “various textual traditions, various darshanas, various rishis, parampara, languages, types of recitations in oral forms…” (pg 13).

Further, it asserts that social sciences must be non-ideological and “avoid public controversies”. In this, the position paper, as with all the recent attempts to redirect education, overlooks the importance of enabling learners and all citizens to understand both past forms of contestations and conflict and to negotiate contemporary contestations via forms of empathy and tolerance.

The position paper is to be appreciated for its call to have social science texts in various languages of Karnataka such as Tulu, Konkani, Arebashe, Byari, Sanketi, and Havyaka. But it will be interesting to see which and whose texts will be permitted to gain entry into the school syllabus or what will be promoted as additional reading.

Given the trajectory that the Government of Karnataka has taken in revising, diluting and distorting education in Karnataka, it is not a surprise that key social scientists and educationists who have contributed significantly to high-quality education in the state have not been involved in developing this position paper. Instead, the authors of the position paper seem to be selected for their ideological and political consensus with the ruling dispensation and its powers.

In each of these violations against the education system, Karnataka is losing the few gains that were made in school education. The prolonged droughts of the 1980s ushered in the midday meal system, even prior to the national Right to Food Act and the initiation of midday meals; the late Anita Kaul initiated a Kannada/Karnataka version of ‘joyful learning’ as the ‘nali kali’ programme; and the strengthening of the School Development and Monitoring Committees that Prof Niranjanaradhya and others facilitated and which led to a genuine democratisation of school education, are all records that highlight these gains.

But now, a coterie of subservient scholars are promoting religious nationalist ideologies that are couched in terms of regaining lost heritage and culture. The real victims of such narrow sectarian agendas are not only the education system as a whole but also the large body of young learners whose future has been compromised by the failure to promote an education system that can assure them a future of living in harmony.

(The writer is a Social
Anthropologist)