When children are killed in a war, statistics don’t reveal how old they were at the time of death. Similarly, when compensation is calculated for the victims of a natural or man-made disaster, the age at which a child’s growth and education was disrupted is not considered. Yet, disruption has sharply different implications for a three-year-old compared to a 13-year-old. Each suffers a different kind of trauma, but the term “childhood” conceals the distinction.
Even more deceptive is the term “adolescence”. Its span is believed to cover the early teen years, associated with changing moods and unpredictable behaviour. How adolescents think is even more mysterious. For routine purposes, they generally show maturity, and among the poor, they are expected to perform adult roles. But few people, including parents and educators, understand the mental architecture of the teen years and what is worth teaching at this age.
Is it a good idea to teach about corruption to a 13-year-old studying in Class VIII? The recent debate over a Social Science textbook completely bypassed this moot question.
When the Supreme Court gave an adverse verdict on a new Social Science textbook, many commentators wrote that there was nothing wrong with teaching judicial corruption in Class VIII. Few people, even among professional educators, read Piaget or Freud these days. They are briefly discussed in some teacher training institutes, mainly to enable students to answer exam questions. Piaget devoted his life to understanding cognitive development during childhood while Freud delved into the unconscious mind of the young child. The two great scholars represent two different lineages of modern knowledge, about intellectual and emotional growth. Rather few attempts have been made to combine Piagetian and Freudian insights for application in education. From Piaget, we learn that children’s capacity to think in abstract terms takes a very long time — almost 16 years. It is only in the more mature years of adolescence that the ability to draw a bigger, complex picture of social reality begins to manifest. In the Freudian paradigm, too, age 16 is important as it marks the end of the high tide of idealism. Equipped with conceptual capacity, the adolescent mind notices reality from a critical perspective.
Thus, both schools of psychological knowledge remind us how sensitive and crucial the early teens are — the years that coincide, roughly, with classes VII, VIII and IX. These are the years of idealism and the struggle to develop the capacity to think objectively. The advent of the “formal” stage, using Piaget’s terminology, brings with it a sudden recognition of a complex reality, which, in turn, brings cynicism to many adolescents, especially the ones whose idealism was injured at its peak. Every subject of study contributes to this difficult journey, but teachers and parents are often deceived by children’s use of language that suggests far greater understanding than they actually possess.
Many teachers are aware of the inner turmoil that children in classes VI to X are going through. However, our system offers little time or autonomy to teachers to treat children individually. The rush to complete the syllabus, along with the compulsion to prepare students for frequent tests, forces most teachers to overlook the psychological confusion of adolescent years.
The central argument of the Court’s verdict is that Class VIII students are of an impressionable age. The verdict objects to the inclusion of a section titled “Corruption in the Judiciary” and another one, “Justice delayed is Justice denied”. The style of writing throughout the chapter is stiff and flat. This kind of writing is usually found in undergraduate-level textbooks. In textbooks for school-age children, one expects a style that arouses curiosity and motivates readers to explore and reflect. Writing for children is never easy, but with topics like justice, corruption and delays, the challenge is a lot tougher for several reasons. For children of Piaget’s pre-formal stage of intellectual growth, concepts like justice, judicial delay and corruption cannot be treated without denting the idealistic architecture of the adolescent mind.
But aren’t these children already aware of corruption, a senior lawyer asked me. He was apparently going by the wide exposure that children of all ages have these days to conversations about bribery and nepotism. Exposure to such vocabulary is of little use to teachers who want to bring conceptual clarity about social, political or legal institutions. In fact, the knowledge derived from desultory sources like social media hampers a teacher’s real task — cultivating curiosity about contemporary conditions and their impact on institutions. These conditions also form the context of the preparation and publication of the contested text. Commentators who see a judicial overreach in this case are perhaps unaware of the wider curricular pandemonium that prevails across the system, in both school and higher education.
The debate over the textbook under discussion has completely ignored psychological and pedagogic issues. Imagine a teacher faced with the task of explaining sentences like this one: “Society has many complex interactions happening all the time, both personal and professional.” Explaining this to a Sociology undergraduate will also be difficult, let alone to a Class VIII child. Take another example: “As human societies grew larger and more complex systems of governance started emerging.” Then there is a section titled “Substantive and Procedural Justice”. No matter how qualified a teacher explaining such sentences to 13-year old boys and girls may be, the meaning will remain elusive.
The pedagogic challenge would be no less for an Aristotle or a Panini. They would probably choose a different text to draw their pupil’s attention to the idea of justice and its social experience. These renowned teachers had the freedom to teach without a textbook. In our times, many countries give their teachers the freedom to choose a text they want to use. In our system, textbooks are prescribed and what they contain is used as a basis for examination.
Kumar is a former director of NCERT and the author of Thank You, Gandhi
