Effects of Bigotry on Schoolchildren – Two Articles
Parenting in an Age of Narratives Over Facts
Parthanil Roy and Teesta Setalvad
There was a time when India’s history and social science official texts, though burdened with a slew of dates and events in a top down linear narrative, nevertheless celebrated the reality of the evolution of a rich and diverse civilisational ethos.
Today, the corrosive power of exclusion and hate runs deep: 11 days ago, April 14, reports of a deeply disturbing incident caused concern on social media but was met with a deafening silence by India’s political class. An 11-year-old boy was allegedly thrashed and stripped simply to pressurise him into “chanting religious slogans” in Madhya Pradesh’s Indore. That is how deep hate flows now in India’s veins.
Another recent incident in the cosmopolitan hub of Bengaluru makes for concerning, if not chilling, reading. The co-author and his colleagues were volunteering for a mathematics discussion session for middle and high school students for a couple of hours on a weekend where the subject mathematics is discussed with a bunch of motivated middle and high school students, once a week. The students range from 12 to 18 years in age. These students were chosen through a test on mathematics from classes VI to XI from various schools based in the city. They are extremely good in mathematics though not quite so well-versed in the social sciences, history, etc.
In the midst of this math circle session, there was the mandatory tea/coffee break. The students were chatting with each other and this is when the author overheard a student telling others that he is/was very happy with the current change in the history syllabus. The reason given was simple. For this student talented in mathematics, “Mughals were not ethnically Indians” and “they did nothing other than destroying many Hindu temples”. Herein lies the justification for the erasure from history.
Over nine years now, the present regime has acquired both state power and seemingly limitless access to monetary capital, the burgeoning of the propaganda mill, the WhatsApp University and the manufactured bots and troll armies, and its myriad outfits have been dishing out carelessly perverted and manipulated versions of “fact”, perpetuating dangerously selective myths about all minorities, especially Muslims.
The reason is as much a target of this Orwellian regime as diversity and this is evident from the equally brutally slashing of the Darwinian theory of Evolution from the same official NCERT texts. Easy prey then for bizarre concocted accounts of stem cell theory in ancient India with evidence of genetic science (test tube baby??) existing as “revealed” in the tales of Lord Ganesha’s Head and Karna’s birth! Not to mention flying machines being invented on “Bharatiya” soil!
Where did these students get their history lesson? Which books did they read? Which sources did they refer to? Were the books, the texts or the overall atmosphere a source of such toxicity? Coming from a school kid less than half his age, this was a shell-shocker to the co-author, assuming as he does that the study of both mathematics and science needs reasoning and logic, not propaganda and hate.
Parenting was never easy, but it has become even more challenging under the current regime. As hate and toxicity swirl in our midst, with so much of this poison just a clickbait video or WhatsApp forward away, one realises how careful, really careful, we need to be with our own kids. Teen and under teen, they are the future citizens of this country. What should the counter communication and counter experience techniques that we should apply as parents, given that the WhatsApp University is so all pervasive, the propaganda so systematic and negative?
To repeat the old cliché, charity begins at home. We cannot expect our ten year olds to respect people belonging to different communities unless we practise a lived respect for diversity and co-habitation with differences.
How many of us have attended an iftar party in the recent past? How many of us have eaten a meal in a Muslim home along with our kids? How many of us know how Christians observe Lent before Easter Sunday? Or what is the significance of December 6 for Dalit children and parents? How many of us relatively privileged Indians really care?
To probe further, how many of us walk with our children into spaces where young kids from various ethnic background can and do freely interact? Unless we make a special, all-out effort, tolerance and plurality will fade and a rigid monochromatic existence will be thrust upon us. Brazenly brushing out a rather unique lived history of vibrant colours, difference and yes, plurality. That is the truth of our civilizational ethos that we need to reclaim with several positive steps before it is violently snatched away.
(Parthanil Roy is a professor at the Indian Statistical Institute Bangalore Centre. This article is based on the authors’ personal experience and opinion. Teesta Setalvad is a journalist and human rights defender. Courtesy: SabrangIndia, a blog of Communalism Combat, edited by Teesta Setalvad and Javed Anand.)
Can WHO’s ‘Life Skills’ Counter the Effects of Bigotry on Schoolchildren?
Rohit Kumar
The poison of communal hatred has now entered India’s schools. Children in the classroom are now speaking the same language of prejudice they hear on TV and in their homes. This is a tragedy that was waiting to happen.
Any schoolteacher willing to talk frankly about the topic, especially in north India, will give you examples aplenty. (It is worth noting, however, that none of the dozen or so teachers I spoke with in the National Capital Region about this issue wished to be named.)
A teacher from an affluent school in South Delhi said, “Yesterday I had to break up a fight between two Grade 4 kids, one Hindu and the other Muslim. The child from the Hindu family was accusing the Muslim child of being ‘an enemy’ because of his religion, something that the Muslim child was understandably very upset about. And these are kids who are barely 8 or 9 years old!”
Another teacher from a school in Gurugram spoke of how she had accompanied a group of students for an inter-school competition to a nearby school and how, for the space of almost half an hour, she could overhear senior school students in a nearby classroom loudly chanting, “Jai Shri Ram! Jai Shri Ram! Jai Shri Ram!”
The accounts sound surreal and would be hard to believe, except that I have personally experienced something similar while doing a workshop for students of Class 11, again in a private school in Delhi.
At the start of the session, I wished the students “Good morning”, and while most students mumbled a sleepy “Good morning” back, one boy returned the greeting with a loud “Jai Shri Ram!”
I stared at him for a few seconds and then remembered how a school principal in Meerut had responded in a similar situation.
“Jai Hind,” I said to him.
Undeterred, the boy responded again with “Jai Shri Ram!”
Once again, I responded with “Jai Hind.”
Unbelievably, the boy yet again said, “Jai Shri Ram!”
This time I said, “Listen, if you are going to say, ’Jai Shri Ram’, then you also need to say ‘Allah-o-Akbar’, ‘Sat Sri Akal’, ‘Hallelujah’ and ‘Buddham Sharanam Gachhami’, because India is a land of many religions. We are also a secular republic where all religions are accorded equal status by the Constitution of India, which happens to be the country’s governing document. I think it’s a lot easier to just say ‘Jai Hind!’, isn’t it?”
After a few very long seconds, the boy replied, “Jai Hind.”
It felt like a small win in the moment, but just about an hour or so into the workshop, another student in all earnestness asked me why we should be “tolerant towards Muslims”, seeing how their “ancestors plundered and looted our country for a thousand years”.
There is something very distressing about seeing young people put aside logic and common sense and instead, adopt a worldview based wholly on hate, exaggerations, half-truths and outright lies and misinformation!
A teacher from a school in NOIDA shared a wise insight. “The two years that children spent cooped up at home during the lockdown has done a lot of them a fair amount of damage, as the only value system they were exposed to was their parents’, which in many cases really wasn’t the best. At least when they come to school, they are exposed to other points of view and ways of looking at the world.”
As parents, caregivers and educators, it is well worth remembering that when proponents of Hindutva denigrate the basic human values enshrined in the Preamble of the Constitution of India – secularism, justice, liberty, equality and fraternity – they are, in fact, attacking the very idea of what it means to be a decent, kind and inclusive human being.
How, then, do we counter the rising tide of hate and bigotry that threatens to overwhelm our children? One viable way of doing so is by teaching them the ten core ‘life skills’ listed by the World Health Organisation (WHO) at the turn of the century, as essential skills for children to master. These are:
- Self-awareness
- Empathy
- Creative thinking
- Critical thinking
- Decision-making
- Problem solving
- Effective communication
- Interpersonal relationships
- Coping with stress
- Coping with emotions.
It is well-nigh impossible for bigotry and hate to take root in a child or young person who possesses the above. Think about it. A child rich in self-awareness and empathy will never fall into the trap of bigotry and stereotyping. He or she will understand that:
‘I am you
And you are me
And we are they
And they are we.
When I hurt you
Then I hurt me
When you hurt me
Then you hurt thee.
So let’s just stop
And let’s be kind
And not be harsh
And not be blind.’
Children who know how to think critically will naturally question a hysterical, hate-filled narrative and will use their own rational faculties to discern the input they are receiving. For kids to think critically, it is also imperative that they a) read a lot and b) read a wide variety of books. Reading is something that is unfortunately being elbowed out more and more by social media and screen time, but wise adults will do well to encourage the young to read more.
Children who are practiced in creative thinking will often be too busy being creative to be destructive. A young person who is engaged in finding new and better ways of being in the world often won’t have the time or inclination to hurt others or put them down.
Young people who have learned how to make decisions and solve problems are those who have also learned positive ways to find positive. They don’t blame others and wallow in self-pity, for they have learned how to transform their pain instead of transmitting it to others. Such young people will not buy into the narrative of victimhood that Hindutva thrives on.
Kids who have life skills also have good interpersonal relations because they have learned how to communicate effectively with others. These are kids who have understood that it is far better to live in peace than in a state of perpetual (real or imagined) conflict.
It goes without saying, then, that a child or young person who has some level of proficiency in each of the life skills mentioned above will naturally be one who has learned to cope with stress and strong emotions and will not get swayed by the fear and alarm that the right-wing systematically spreads.
The WHO’s Life Skills framework is an effective one that can help a child grow up to be a happy, peaceful, and intelligent adult. Let’s teach our children to become wise human beings, and not moral failures.
(Rohit Kumar is an educator with a background in positive psychology and psychometrics. Courtesy: The Wire.)
