Tags:
Journalism of Courage
The pressure from its Left 8220;bosses8221; is beginning to tell on the functioning of the HRD ministry. Since it cannot withdraw Murli Manohar Joshi8217;s 8220;gift8221; of shabbily revised textbooks to schoolchildren in the middle of a school year, it now wants to control 8212; through the good offices of the NCERT 8212; the history teacher in the schoolroom. If earlier this hapless individual had to highlight the glories of the Vedic age and tune up the atrocities of Old Aurangzeb, he/she is now required to go easy on the Vedic chant and portray the record of the Mughals in the 8220;right8221; perspective and if the Communists were damned by the earlier dispensation, their legacy has to be suitably retrieved in this one. In other words, if you cannot change the textbooks, psyche the teacher.
All this would have been quite hilarious if did not have serious consequences for thousands of schoolchildren in the country. The HRD ministry8217;s business lies in addressing the broad contours of the country8217;s social and cultural life, not in micro-managing classroom discourse. There can never be an end to this project of tailoring history textbooks to the requirements and sensitivities of numerous players. That is why this newspaper has always argued that the job of writing and interpreting history for schoolchildren should, ideally, be left to the professionals. This crude attempt at spoonfeeding teachers through directives, and the like, is totally objectionable. It is overly bureaucratic in its approach and does not further the healthy debate that should necessarily accompany the imbibing of knowledge at every level.
