New Delhi: Gandhi’s death had a magical effect on the communal situation in the country, Gandhi’s quest for Hindu-Muslim unity incited Hindu extremists, and organizations like the RSS were banned for a while. All these things are now going to be a thing of the past.
The young generation is not going to get to read all these things in school books. Because the lessons related to these are missing from the National Council of Educational Research and Training (NCERT)’s proposed Class 12 Political Science textbook for the new academic session 2023-24 onwards.
The NCERT, as part of its syllabus rationalization exercise last year, had dropped certain parts from the syllabus citing overlapping and irrelevant reasons which included lessons on Gujarat riots, Mughal courts, the Emergency, Cold War, Naxalite movement, etc. There is no mention of many important events and incidents related to Mahatma Gandhi in its new textbooks. However, NCERT claims that there has been no reduction in the syllabus this year and the syllabus was rationalized in June last year.
Changes happened last year, but nothing new this year: NCERT
NCERT Director Dinesh Saklani said that the entire rationalization exercise was done last year, and nothing new has happened this year. However, he did not comment on the missing portions, which were stated to be irrelevant at the time of rationalization.
The NCERT, in a note on its website, wrote that in view of the COVID-19 pandemic, it was felt imperative to reduce the material burden on the students. The National Education Policy (NEP) 2020 also lays emphasis on reducing the content load and providing learning opportunities with an experiential constructivist mindset. With this background, the NCERT started the exercise of rationalizing textbooks for all classes and all subjects.
Efforts to reduce study load and exam stress: Ministry of Education
An education ministry official said that according to the new National Education Policy (NEP), the new syllabus outline is still being worked out and the new textbooks as per the updated syllabus will be introduced only from the 2024 academic session. The current version is a reformatted version after the changes. The current textbooks are rational textbooks.
The effort was started in the era of the Covid-19 epidemic
These were changed for the session 2022-23 and will continue in the 2023-24. Then in view of the prevailing situation of the COVID-19 pandemic, the process of rationalization was initiated to reduce the syllabus burden and exam stress. In which the subject matter is easily accessible to the students and can be learned by the children through self-learning or peer learning and materials. At the same time, excessive interference from teachers and irrelevant course material in the present context was also removed from the curriculum.
