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Social Science Learning in Schools: Perspectives and Challenges Dissatisfaction with textbooks has been as old as the history of modern education in India. There hasn’t been a time in modern history when students did not dump their textbooks and took inexplicable shelter in badly written and badly produced mug books. Not just in India, but across the world, the moment the masses were introduced to textbooks they quickly took to mug books: a far simpler, cruder and often incorrect collection of facts and analyses yet good enough to score well enough in the examinations.
One of the most celebrated efforts to produce high quality textbooks and experiment with alternate teaching methods was undertaken by a group of young education enthusiasts in the 1970s. They began with intervening in the processes of learning the sciences. A later involvement in the social sciences resulted in the creation of textbooks under the aegis of Eklavya. The textbooks and the pedagogy strategies underlying them attracted much attention of all those interested in school education. It is those books that are the subject of detailed content analyses presented in this book. Seldom has such a detailed exercise been undertaken in India. For that alone, one would commend this book to interested readers. The Eklavya textbooks brought forth the importance of social sciences to mould a right-thinking human being and citizen. To that end, the textbooks evolved through a number of workshops with teachers and other stakeholders. After some two decades of teaching social sciences the Eklavya way, it was time for a critical evaluation. The essays in this book bring to us in brief the experiences of the Eklavya team in developing a curriculum and the reception of the resulting texts by students and teachers. This is accompanied by an evaluation of the textbooks-chapter-wise-by experts in political science, geography and history. Alongside are three essays by the editor. In one essay, she introduces the Eklavya perspective on social sciences. Another provides one of the most impressive narrations regarding the importance of social sciences in opening up the minds of young learners. Her concluding essay reiterates the importance of textbooks, engaging children in dialogic learning and social sciences as important for creating a more balance awareness among children of the surrounding world. She also brings forward the problems faced by stand-alone programmes, when the rest of the education system continues to remain mired in the unimaginative traditional way of teaching. The book concludes with an epilogue which narrates how despite political hostility and withdrawal of administrative support to the social science experiment the government had to recognise the importance of the textbooks generated by Eklavya. Amman Madan’s review note on the civics curriculum and Tripta Wahi’s on history tell of how the Eklavya texts present a vision of the state in which people too have a voice, they lobby and pressurise the government. In civics and history they find the Eklavya books do break new ground. The books on the whole sensitise children to the diversity of life, conflicts and contradictions therein. However, as Wahi points out, there are some slippages when ideas, such as Sufism, which are more in consonance with the presumed ideals of the Eklavya project are less critically presented. Sunny and Menon evaluate the geography curriculum to say that the Eklavya books show just a marginal improvement over traditional school texts. The Eklavya team’s own report from the field mentions the two major problems that exist with transacting these textbooks. They currently exist as stand-alone programmes with little relationship with the surrounding teaching and testing environment. Moreover, they require far more work from teachers. To improve the environment of education as a whole requires a much larger societal and political effort.
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Dismayed teachers and
education experts have made many failed attempts to understand this
preference for mug books. Many efforts have been made to produce
superior quality textbooks. Such efforts have often been based on the
presumption that the previous textbooks were deeply flawed, did not
involve the learner in the learning process, taught the wrong kind of
ideas, closed young minds in the name of opening them, over-burdened the
teacher and in general did not do any good to anyone.