Badri Raina, and Wire Staff

Republican Values, Or Things That Students Need Not Learn

Badri Raina

It is said that when Benjamin Franklin emerged from the concluding session of the Constitutional Convention, one Mrs. Powell asked him, “What have you given us?”

“A Republic,” he responded, “if you can keep it.”

That claim, of course, stood glossed by the trenchant irony that, at that point in 1787, the American constitution framed in Independence Hall in Philadelphia did not include the right to vote for American women.

Only after heroic struggles by American suffragettes was that right realised in 1920.

Just as the formal right granted in 1870 to African-American men to vote was actually to fructify as late as 1965 when the Voting Rights Bill was passed.

Yet, some 230 years after the adoption of the American constitution, the United States under the Trump presidency can be seen to be embroiled in another historic battle to preserve the republic and all its democratic and institutional accomplishments.

The situation in India is not too different.

The Indian constitution granted the right to universal adult franchise from its very inception, transcending some stiff opposition from deeply conservative sections of the Constituent Assembly.

A pivotal aspect of that revolutionary accomplishment was the new emphasis on expanding literacy in order to lift the mass of Indians out of ignorance and render their exercise of franchise sentient and independent. Long decades of struggle were finally to culminate in the legislation by parliament on August 4, 2009, which made access to free school education a legally enforceable right.

Needless to say, that education about republican values and citizen’s struggles to realise them is transmitted to students in academic institutions through a study of social and political science curriculum, and, overall, through a study of the history of cultural oppressions and aspirations.

Those histories also teach us that when nation-states come to centralise economic and political power, the existence and sanctity of democratic institutions and imperatives notwithstanding, it is not the hard sciences that offer much resistance. Such resistance invariably comes from the social scientists and historians who insist on educating us about the non-negotiable status of republican goals and the required modes of governmental conduct thereof.

Caveat: There was a time when the hard sciences became the chief instruments of progressive historical transformation (recall Copernicus and all those that followed in changing irretrievably our consciousness of material forces and phenomenon). But, as the new revolutionary classes settled down to profit accumulation, science needed to be reduced suitably to technologies that would no longer ask humanist questions but serve the interests of endowed classes.

For a century or more now, the burden of humanist scrutiny has been carried forward by historians and social scientists. One must always remember that many historians and social scientists have, nonetheless, continued to owe allegiance to revanchist and reactionary structures of thought.

Closed authority structures then develop a vested interest in keeping from citizens critical knowledge of social and political formations and of constitutional values that pertain to principles of republican democracy, even while they obtain executive legitimacy from democratic forms of government formation. The possibility of such a degradation of liberal archives of politics into authoritarianism was eloquently explored by Horkheimer and Adorno in their path-breaking Dialectic of Enlightenment.

Such authorities begin to clip the wings of the sources of progressive humanist knowledge by either cutting resources to the social sciences, or by taking recourse to sundry strong-arm methods available to the state. But, most of all, by reformulating schools curricula to the state’s ideological requirements.

Within any educational system, it is a given that the content and quality of curricula suggest what authorities who frame those curricula think to be desirable or deleterious to the development of citizen’s cognitive allegiance to the ideological preferences of ruling social forces.

And, exclusions from the curricula are often far more indicative of the bent of those authorities than the inclusions.

In that context, the shredding of subjects inscribed in the Social Science, Political Science, and History text books of class 9, 10, and 11 of Indian schools just announced by the Central Board of School Education (CBSE) on directive from the Minister of Human Resource Development, no less, must be seen as a telling pointer to the priorities of the present central government.

Arguing that the “burden” on senior school students needs to be reduced, for the year 2020-2021 In view of the disruption caused by the COVID-19 calamity, it is proposed that subjects like, inter alia, ‘Democracy and Diversity,’ ‘Gender, Religion, Caste,’ ‘Popular Struggles and Movements’, ‘Challenges to Democracy’, ‘Citizenship’, Nationalism’, ‘Secularism’, ‘Federalism’, ‘Planning Commission and Five-Year Plans’, ‘Peasants, Zamindars, and the State’, ‘Understanding Partition’, and ‘Mathematical Reason’ be excluded from the existing curriculum for purposes of examinations.

In effect, all those materials that bear on the formation of republican citizenship, a republican constitution, and a critical understanding of how we came to be and who we are, and what our role as citizens of a republic is in upholding republican principles are to be ejected as matters of lesser consequence than the imbibing of supposedly ideologically neutral skills. The ejection of such materials, of course, reveals how frustrated authorities are with their critical and social import.

All this of course falls pat within the intellectual parameters of a nationalism that looks upon open liberal enquiry into state formations as anathema. In so far as such enquiry often brings into question the unanalysed or tendentious economic, cultural and historical predilections of closed authority structures, it is always the social sciences and truthful history writing that present the most obstacles to the closure of the governing arrangements of autocratic rule.

It should be clear from the above list of exclusions that the “bad” and the “ugly” must be jettisoned from study and deliberation; unsurprisingly, all of these exclusions impinge on the right of diverse oppressed segments of the citizenry to learn of both their sources of oppression and their republican rights and prerogatives.

Coming as this does in the wake of what we have seen of the plight of millions of trudging immigrants—an instructive episode that brought to the fore the continuing fault lines of caste, class, gender, and religious identity—the diktat seems to announce a clampdown on such learning and pedagogy that may raise questions of macro-historical distress and discrimination that continue to plague the republic.

Note that the honourable minster does not include such subjects in the “core” values of education or of “learning achievement.”

Just as one wonders what Franklin may have thought of the current goings-on in the American Republic, one may wonder what the founding fathers of the Indian freedom movement and the framers of the Indian Constitution may have thought of these revanchist moves in the substance and conduct of Indian school education.

John Dewey, that doyen of educationists, once wrote that the true aim and purpose of education is education.

Not so.

(Badri Raina has taught at Delhi University.)

✫✫✫

CBSE’s Deletion of Chapters on Ecology, Evolution During Pandemic ‘Ironic,’ Say Biologists

The Wire Staff

9 July 2020: The Indian Society of Evolutionary Biologists has come down heavily on the Central Board of Secondary Education’s decision to scrap chapters on evolution and ecology in order to tackle the lag in lessons caused by the coronavirus pandemic.The full statement is as follows:

The Indian Society of Evolutionary Biologists has noted with grave concern the recent news about the dropping of entire chapters on the living world (systematics), reproduction in organisms, evolution, ecosystem, and environmental issues from the Biology curricula of CBSE for Classes 10, 11 and 12 during the academic year 2020-21. This is part of a 30% reduction in curricula due to the disruption in academic activities caused by the ongoing coronavirus pandemic.

This pandemic has tragically highlighted the consequences of our neglecting to give evolution and ecology their deservedly central position in research and education in biology in India. Understanding practically every aspect of a zoonotic pandemic requires a thorough grounding in diverse areas of ecology and evolution, such as species interactions, population dynamics, coevolutionary dynamics, evolution of host range expansions, transmission dynamics of pathogens, and many others. Indeed, public health in general leans very heavily on many aspects of evolution and ecology, including human ecology, in addition to classical medical science. A direct consequence of our long-standing neglect of ecology and evolution in our biology curricula and research programmes is the relative paucity of epidemiologists in India. This renders the removal of most of evolution and ecology, including systematics and the diversity of life, from the Class 10-12 syllabus not only dangerously tragic, but ironic as well.

Ecology and evolution are central to any understanding of the living world and, indeed, provide the conceptual framework within which we make sense of the amazing diversity of life-forms and life-processes, at various levels of biological organization. Without ecology and evolution, biology would be little more than a haphazard collection of interesting but unconnected facts. As the Nobel laureate Sir Peter Medawar said, “For a biologist, the alternative to thinking in evolutionary terms is not to think at all”.

Societies today face many problems that require a solid and deep foundation in ecology and evolution if we are to have any hope of finding viable solutions to them. For example, crop improvement through animal and plant breeding, assessing the risks of genetically modified organisms, understanding and managing the myriad consequences of climate change and environmental degradation, controlling zoonotic diseases and pandemics, dealing with the evolution of multi-drug resistance in pathogens, managing agricultural and other pests and disease vectors, managing wildlife, ensuring the maintenance of important ecosystem services (e.g. pollination), understanding ageing and so-called life-style diseases, the appropriate use of DNA data for forensics and historical reconstruction, and understanding many aspects of human social behaviour and social pathologies, all require an approach steeped in ecological and evolutionary principles and concepts if we are to deal with them effectively.

Ecology, evolution and systematics have already been neglected in Indian biology education and research for far too long, with immense detrimental effects on our ability to effectively tackle a wide variety of societal problems. In these times, it is crucial to redress the imbalance in biology education and research, rather than add to it.

While ISEB appreciates that it might be necessary to reduce the curriculum in these troubled times, we believe that the removal of entire central topics is not the way to achieve that goal. It would be better to reduce the academic load on students by trimming advanced sub-topics from most chapters across the curriculum, such that students still get an overall understanding of biology. In light of the central significance of ecology and evolution to both academic biology and to solving problems challenging our society, ISEB appeals to CBSE to reconsider the present scheme of deletion of entire chapters on ecology and evolution from the biology curricula for Classes 10-12. Students are our future, and depriving them of entire chapters related to ecology, evolution and systematics will be a serious lacuna in their education. ISEB would be happy to help CBSE in this regard.

Executive Council, ISEB

(Courtesy: The Wire.)