Caste…what caste?
(This post was written by Akanksha Bapna, Coordinator, Research at CCS.)
The declaration by the Gujarat Department of Education to remove any derogatory reference to caste, religion, profession or gender from school textbooks and their ban on the use of surnames to address students in has got me thinking. Whilst I agree that last names in India easily discern castes and communities, how a phrase like ‘khoob ladi mardani woh to Jhansi waali rani thi’ (a reference to the famous Rani Lakshmi Bai) could be discriminatory, is beyond the exaggerated extrapolation of my imagination.
A link to the article can be found here.
Three issues really bothered me when I read this piece of news. One, the self-contradictory manner in which the government functions; two, the necessity to shy away from the responsibility to confront social issues; and three, the lack of autonomy faced by our schools.
The first is the self-contradictory manner in which the government functions. The Department of Education (Gujarat) states that sentences like “Being a girl, Ragini showed exceptional courage” will be removed from school textbooks to discourage gender-based generalizations. Interestingly, the Department itself runs programs for improving gender equality and includes schemes like the NPEGEL (National Program for the Education of Girls at the Elementary Level) and the KGBV (Kasturba Gandhi Balika Vidyalaya) under SSA (Sarva Shiksha Abhiyan), acknowledging the reality that women are the weaker section of our society. Exclusion of such a statement from school textbooks, serves absolutely no purpose then. Contrarily, such a sentence has the potential to be used to understand why it was noteworthy for a girl to have shown courage in the first place. What were the factors in our society that have deterred girls from such acts of courage and what we should be doing to change them instead!
Another example, the State Department of Social Justice and Empowerment has a scheme that provides scholarships to meritorious students belonging to the SC/ST (Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes) category. The State here identifies beneficiaries based on the very criteria they do not wish to talk about. I find it hard to imagine how these students would be felicitated at an awards ceremony:
“The award for highest marks in Mathematics for a SC student goes to Shyam (and we cant say what his last name is because that will give away his caste)“.
The second aspect of this notification that worried me was the ease with which our policymakers wash their hands off the responsibility of understanding and addressing differences and facing our reality. The Department has asserted that in order to discourage casteism in classrooms, last names will be used in schools only for administrative purposes. However, calling every child Ramu or Munni will not make things equal for them at home or in their communities.
Take the example of Germany, where albeit harshly, young minds are exposed to the reality of the Holocaust at the age of twelve and thirteen so that they may learn from the mistakes of history and a horrific event like that may never occur again. It is a difficult topic to grapple with and two generations later, the youth still bear the burden of guilt. But the topic is confronted and addressed, unlike India where we would rather brush away issues in order to avoid tough conversations.
In simply deleting ‘offensive’ content from textbooks, curriculum coordinators have failed to consider the fact that not talking about a problem will not make it go away. India takes pride in its Unity amidst Diversity. We know that we are all not the same so we might as well confront the fact. Caste and religion-based discrimination will exist till we find the courage to face and address it.
The third issue is the obvious lack of autonomy our schools have. I have had some experience working with researchers in curriculum-determining bodies and there is no group of people more removed from reality than this learned lot. Decisions to change textbooks are made in air conditioned-conference rooms without knowing or testing how these changes will affect the social and academic aspect of learning in a remote village of the country. Stakeholders are almost never consulted and schools always informed ex post of what needs to be done, and that too without explanation. Unless autonomy of decision-making trickles to the ground, effective implementation of policies cannot be achieved. We therefore need to consider methods of empowering schools and establish a feedback mechanism that will tell us what the children want and need to learn in this global climate.
Thus, informed and evidence-based policymaking, the will to accept differences and confront reality and a mechanism of empowering stakeholders are necessary to improve the situation on the ground, such that when a teacher calls out “Mr. Meena”, the headmaster passing by the classroom does not find it necessary to reprimand him.
