A few months ago, I was visiting my sister’s home. While the family chatted away pleasantly, my little niece—who is studying in 4th standard in a CBSE school—was dutifully attending her online classes via computer. Suddenly, I almost dropped my cup of tea in shock when I fleetingly overheard something that the science teacher was teaching. The topic was “Jehangir, the Just” and the teacher was extolling the virtues of the Mughal king Jehangir. I immediately asked my sister to bring me the science textbook to fully understand the situation. Yes, there it was, in the NCERT textbook—the glorification of Mughal kings—right from 4th standard itself. After the classes ended, I asked my niece if she knew about any Tamil kings. The 8-year-old looked at me amusingly and quipped, “Mama, what Tamil kings? There were only brave and kind Mughal kings in India.” I almost got a heart attack…
For the longest time in India, parents’ hearts have been bleeding as they pay for and powerlessly watch the slow brainwashing of their children. While every intelligent and informed educator recognises the poison being taught in Indian schools, they can only wring their hands helplessly as they continue to teach it to their unsuspecting, innocent students. Labelled as “liberal” education and prescribed top-down by successive governments, irrelevant and toxic “educational” content (read as, political propaganda) has been force-fed to successive generations of India to deskill and deracinate the population in order to turn them into brainwashed, self-loathing and incompetent zombies. Today’s working generation sadly acknowledges that they are less confident and less risk-taking than their parents. They are fearful of the future. Children and teens commit suicide at the drop of a hat. India’s middle class is cowering like sheep, primed for slaughter by global anti-India forces.
The only permanent solution to prevent disaster is to free India’s education system from the clutches of government, because every political party in government will push its own agenda at the cost of the nation and its people. Desperate times call for desperate measures. So, here is a radical solution to completely free India’s education system from political manipulations by current and future central and state governments. It is based on Bharat’s ancient and successful organisation structure of “decentralisation” which prevents wholesale corruption of people and systems.
With the arrival of the Common Universities Entrance Test (CUET), it has become possible for government to completely exit the education sector and hand it over to private entities, which would be similar to Bharat’s ancient Gurukul system. All the government has to do is to prescribe a syllabus for the summative evaluation at the 12th standard exit level. Then, individual schools can be allowed to design their own syllabus to incrementally build their curriculum from kindergarten to 12th standard that leads up to this prescribed syllabus. The advantages of this system are multifold:
(a) vested interests can no longer manipulate the education system from a central point
(b) educators—and not bureaucrats—can decide what is best for students
(c) parents can choose which school gives their children the best education
(d) bad or anti-national schools will automatically wither away because of lack of patronage from parents
(e) the massive education bureaucracy can be dismantled and reassigned to other sovereign activities, thereby saving cost and time wastage.
A handful of individuals in the government’s education department cannot be expected to know and design the curriculum and textbooks for a multicultural nation of 1.4 billion people. As in ancient Gurukul schools, local educators know what is best for their local students. Minor issues, such as transferability of students, can be addressed by the schools themselves. Albeit, the exit-level CUET will anyway bring uniformity at the national level at 12th standard, which is the time when uniformity and transferability become important concerns.
Anyway, coming back to my story… after recovering from the shellshock, I sat my little niece and gave a priming lesson on “Manuneethi Cholan, the Just”. Then, over several sessions, I also tutored her on the various Indian kings, including Lord Ram, Harishchandra, Yudhishtra, Shibi, Rajaraja Chola, et al. At the end, with as much earnestness as I could summon, I impressed upon her the following: “Dear child, just mug up and repeat whatever is taught in your school for examination’s sake. Never believe any of it.” Seeing the confused agreement in her innocent eyes, my eyes moistened…
Jai Hind!
