It is sad that lately we keep discovering cruel and regressive messages in the material meant to shape the young generation into kind, responsible and respectful human beings. Recently a Class XII Social Science textbook, published and circulated by the Maharashtra State Board authority, validated a social ill and a disgusting label unashamedly by stating that a man’s family may demand high dowry, particularly when the girl is “ugly” or “handicapped”. If that wasn’t bad enough – a new shocker aimed at children just surfaced.
A throwback to the faint memories of primary school days is a usually a nostalgia of envy from our little selves who were just beginning to grasp the basic concepts about the world around us. Those exploratory activities and experiments within books taught us about about the chlorophyll pigment in leaves and encouraged us to observe the lives of numerous living creatures in our environment. An environmental science textbook for a fourth-grade curriculum in a well-known school in Delhi, however, was recently found to have a baffling, cruel experiment planted in to ‘teach’ students that all living creatures need air to breathe.
Even a line drawing of a dead kitten has been provided, which makes you wonder who drew it and who let that pass into print, uncensored? And all this is in the book called “Our Green World” – which supposedly should be teaching about conservation and living with harmony with nature and the other forms of life present in the human habitat. Instead, it makes a mockery of the same by asking a little child to treat animals as pure expendable material in the name of scientific curiosity. That’s chilling because such ideas could only qualify as building blocks for those notorious ‘doctor-scientists’ of Nazi Germany who were commissioned to ‘experiment’ on captive Jewish subjects.
Even by accident and even for an adult – killing an innocent animal would be a scarring incident on the conscience. To propose that by design is a grotesque oversight on the part of the publishers Millennium Booksource Pvt. Ltd. and careless on the part of the school that did not bother to screen their curated textbooks.
People tasked with the responsibility to educate really need to be proactive about weeding out such utterly inexcusable follies.
