NCF AND SOCIAL SCIENCE

Textbooks should certainly be child-friendly but it is equally necessary that the school teacher should be made child-friendly. Teachers need a more intensive exposure to social science concepts, changes in data and methods in history, and critical inquiry.

There has been a public debate on the NCF, the more widely publicized aspect has been on textbooks in history. There has, however, been less concern with other constituent subjects of the social sciences, namely the input of geography, politics, economics, and sociology. The approach of the social sciences is relevant to scientists as part of integrated knowledge needs emphasizing. In addition to textbooks, two other aspects of the curriculum require immediate attention — the training of teachers and the re organisation of the examination system. These are recognized in the NCF but in a somewhat limited manner.

Textbooks are not the only source of knowledge in school nor the only way of encouraging the development of a critical mind, although if sufficiently sensitively written (and this is rare), they can perform both functions. The accepted function of textbooks is to provide a framework for the student to access knowledge in a particular subject. We generally don't remember textbooks triggering off creative ideas in our school-going youth. We do remember a particular teacher or a particular book outside the curriculum.

A textbook in history should provide the infrastructure of the subject: reliable information about the past, an explanation of how this information can be analysed, and what this tells us implicitly or explicitly about aspects of the society in which we live. The range selected would vary according to the syllabus requirement. 

The old textbooks are critiqued, as being heavy and dull and therefore diverting students from history, and for being concerned with developmental issues. Development as such may be out of fashion these days, but the issues with which these older textbooks were concerned are still with us. They will have to be addressed in whatever textbooks are used, issues such as the causes of economic inequality, the continuity of social privilege, the intervention of religious institutions in civic life, and the use of religious ideologies for political mobilization. Indian society in its history has experienced considerable achievements but has also had to grapple with inequality, injustices, and violence. These are of significance in understanding the present.

According to the NCF, the old textbooks should give way to books with a child-centered pedagogy. Textbooks should certainly be accessible to the young readers for whom they are intended. However, there is some fear that the emphasis on pedagogy may erode the disciplinary orientation of the subject. Each of the social sciences has its specific take on knowledge and students should be made familiar with these. 

The document says that the social sciences will explain diversities in Indian society with references to local conditions so that the existence of variants can be understood by children in their local context. One hopes that the social sciences will also explain how diversities came or come into being, why there is an inequality among diverse groups, and how attitudes supporting this inequality are constructed.

Textbooks should certainly be child-friendly but it is equally necessary that the school teacher should be made child-friendly. It is not enough to encourage participative discussions between teachers and students in class. An extensive program-me of familiarizing schoolteachers both with changes in the methods and concepts of the social sciences and with child-centered pedagogy will help. Without this, there will be no essential change in either the approach to the subject or the pedagogy. Children will still be required to memorize sections of the new or old textbook and reproduce these for the exam. Instant workshops for history teachers are not going to make a dent. Teachers need a more intensive exposure if they are to understand the concepts of the social sciences.

Courses by the Open University on various subjects can be yet another source of orienting teachers to new knowledge. The creation of an educational channel on TV for both students and teachers remains an untapped resource for the social sciences.

There should be a regular assessment of samples of textbooks in each category of schools. But there should be a record to hear if this is being done.  A quality textbook would suggest further reading. But books that claim to be textbooks, irrespective of who publishes them, if they are treated as reliable in the knowledge they convey, must be vetted by a committee of professional scholars in the particular subject and such as are respected by their peer group. Such a committee would be responsible to the public and to the educational system for clearing the disciplinary content of textbooks. Otherwise, textbooks will become like the Internet where anything goes.

If the learning of sections of the textbook by rote and repeating the text in the exam are to be avoided, then the examination system needs to be revamped. This would begin with reorganizing the board of examinations as has been suggested in passing by the National Curriculum Framework. Paper setters and examiners will also have to be retrained to understand the changes required in setting and evaluating examination questions. Evaluating critical thinking and logic based on reading beyond the textbook at the high school level will need an altogether different training for examiners, used as they are to answers repeating what is said in the textbook. Examiners will have to judge whether an answer that differs from that of the textbook shows initiative and further reading, or merely reflects a lack of understanding the question, or worse. One has heard so often from school students about their anxiety as to which historical interpretation to quote in an answer to an examination question, the fear being that one does not know which view is favored by the examiner. Critical thinking would make such a dilemma relatively redundant, but only if the examiner is sensitive to critical thinking.