In an electoral democracy, governments come and go, with or without a concomitant change of political hue. And, usually, the new one steps forward from where the earlier had stopped.
The ideal practice should have been to build upon the “achievements” of the earlier government, looking for what it left out. So that progress, as part of a historical continuity, can be cumulative, adding to what was done before.
In the recent Bengal scenario, however, the new government has to address what was deliberately destroyed and left to rot; and then, only then, build anew an edifice from its ruins. Instead of moving forward from a position of relative advantage, it has to begin almost from zero, so to say.
In the pre-poll vote on accounts presented by the outgoing government on February 5 this year, then finance minister Chandrima Bhattacharya had claimed that the Mamata Banerjee dispensation had spent nearly ₹69,000 crore since 2011 to strengthen “education infrastructure across the state” and make Bengal “future-ready” for
development.
However, the ground realities of education in Bengal under the previous regime paint a different picture with issues like school closures and high dropout rates remaining unaddressed.
In such a state of affairs vis-à-vis education, we cannot wait to see what kind of priority the new government assigns to education in Bengal in terms of allocation in its first budget.
The first priority should be to remove the debris, extirpate the thorny bushes that have grown over and around by so clearing the ground and then think of building afresh, from zero upward.
The very first task is, of course, to bring back the confidence that education is valuable and having it would lead to a viable and meaningful life. The new government should, first of all, guarantee that. The recent news that more students are enrolling in the state’s colleges is a sign that it has begun to happen.
Now the primary need is to reopen and revamp the schools that have been closed, the number runs into thousands I hear, and campaign for attracting students back. Teachers of merit should be employed, helping us forget the sordid history of the process that was written by the last government.
Closed science laboratories should open their doors again, and avenues for science and vocational education should be widened. Many schools, colleges and even university departments suffer from an acute shortage of teachers, although universities have been set up with abandon. This serious lacuna also has to be addressed with some alacrity.
It will sound superfluous to say that steady provision for all facilities — classrooms, recreation rooms, toilets (for both sexes), playgrounds, etc, are a must for institutions, and the same can be said about adequate supply of learning and teaching aids, as well as materials. Special attention should be focused on textbooks for beginners.
My firm view is, the sooner the textbooks created by the wise bodies under the last government are dumped, the better. I had personally gone through both Bengali and English textbooks for primary classes created by these bodies and found them by and large obtuse and insensitive to the needs and readiness of rural students. Those were concocted by citified scholars, who were more eager to exhibit their own (questionable) proficiency in the languages and were blissfully impervious to the fact that most students in primary schools belong to rural areas and are also first-generation learners.
Trying to teach too much is as harmful as trying to teach too little. The first virtually leads to the second. Other textbooks should be reexamined by competent people who must keep this in mind. New textbooks have to be prepared, but before that, workshops on the style, organisation and content of these books should be organised. Teachers in the field must be consulted at every step in this process of textbook preparation. To me, this is the most crucial area where the new government needs to act.
I know that, like every government, the present one is formed by a party which has a world-view of its own, for which I admit that I possess meagre love. And I am apprehensive that, as it has won the popular mandate in the state, it may be too eager to project its own philosophy in the texts it may proceed to prepare.
But, from my hopefully unfavoured position, I plead that the texts that will be prepared under its supervision, particularly those of literature, history and social studies, must not entertain any bias or superstition of any kind and should instead be scientific and rational in their basic framework.
The content of Indian history will not be selected or left out to reflect a Hindutva agenda. Lives of leaders should be carefully chosen for these texts, and a strict scientific judgement should direct the making of the lessons. Only literary excellence should be the criterion for selecting a literary text.
We cannot forget the unpalatable experience that even Rabindranath Tagore’s writings were thrown out of higher secondary English texts in Uttar Pradesh some years ago. Elsewhere in the country, people belonging to the ruling party have been blithely proclaiming about cow’s urine as a panacea, Ravana’s Lanka having an airport full of ancient aircraft, or it was the stem cell technology that made Gandhari of the Mahabharata produce a hundred sons, and a few daughters.
These make us somewhat wary of governmental exercises in the area of making textbooks. Still, as the new government has come through, I repeat, a “popular” mandate, we will expect positive actions in this crucial area.
One of course does not quarrel with the fact that ancient India had a lot to offer in terms of knowledge and the arts, and it had contributed hugely to human civilisation. Sanskrit literature is among the best of ancient literatures in the world, and philosophical, scientific, as well as medical speculation of ancient India are to be studied with reverence and attention.
I can specially mention my own discipline, linguistics, in which our ancient masters excelled and how their findings were appreciated, and used much later in the nineteenth century, to shape a modern science of linguistics.
But still, the world has moved an immeasurable distance ahead in the centuries that followed, and it will be foolish to ignore or bypass the knowledge system that has been produced by the West and the rest of the world in the name of patriotism or worship of the past.
One may add that all civilisations that have come and converged in this country in the course of history have contributed richly to build a pan-Indian civilisation and culture, and in addition, a knowledge system that is also spectacular. This has to be kept in perspective and no bias should distort the facts, in spite of the current spree of changing Islamic names.