Much anxiety has been expressed over the inclusion of contemporary history in the political science syllabus of class XII. Judgement of how these themes are handled should await the completion of the textbook. But the syllabus itself is revolutionary. For the first time there will be room for events that are an embarrassment to the ruling party of the day, not just the opposition. It includes events like the anti-Sikh riots (1984), Gujarat mayhem (2002), the Emergency (1975) etc. The syllabus fills a yawning gap that results from history stopping at 1947. Anyone who has cared to look at the new political science and history textbooks for classes IX and XI, will find complaints against the new curriculum and textbooks baseless. We should hope that the final version of the class X and XII textbooks will measure up to this promise.

There will be areas of disagreement. But the new textbooks are among the most exciting things that have happened in a long time. Scholars central to stewarding the process of curriculum or textbook writing like Ram Guha, Yogendra Yadav, Suhas Palshikar or Neeladari Bhattacharya (hardly a rabid partisan list) among others, have done a magnificent job of infusing new vitality into textbooks.

What makes the new history texts a departure is best expressed in George Eliot’s words: “The highest aim in education is to obtain not results but powers, not particular solutions, but the means by which endless solutions may be wrought. He is the most effective educator who aims less at perfecting specific acquirements than at producing the mental condition which makes acquirements easy.” The issue is not what particular politics or history you teach, the issue is whether students can learn to think. What kinds of questions can we ask about our politics? The ambition is not to preach dull dogma, but cultivate thought itself. The new texts do this wonderfully, and exercises are framed so that the student’s critical acumen can even turn upon the book itself.

One of the conditions of cultivating thinking is that books speak to students. They must provoke discussion, incite new questions and point to ways of finding answers. The old textbooks, with some exceptions, failed on all counts. They were products of pedagogy that had dogmatic faith in its own authority, which believed in purveying truths rather than making students partners in the voyage of discovery. The authoritative voice in those textbooks, generated a counter and corrosive scepticism, and since those textbooks did not trust the intelligence of students, they came not to trust themselves.

The inclusion of contemporary history must be seen in this context. My first political memory is of the horrors of the Emergency and the air of expectation that surrounded the Janata Party coming to power. I was in high school when the anti-Sikh carnage took place in Delhi. Simultaneously the Shah Bano case was threatening to erupt, and even a quick glance at a newspaper would raise all kinds of troubling questions. But the textbooks we had did not even minimally equip us to ask questions about what was happening around us. There were intense conflicts in society, yet the textbooks presented a vision of arcadian harmony. Our political experience was marked by violence and corruption, yet the books carried pious homilies. We were all patriotic, but struggling to understand what patriotism meant, while our textbooks would reduce patriotism to caricature. In an age that is even more marked by information than our age of pre-television innocence was, the yawning gap between textbooks and society is likely to generate an even more corrosive scepticism.

One ought not to underestimate the problems of writing a contemporary history that is unmediated by a powerful vocabulary of human motivations. One needs a supple sense of causation, the paradoxes and ironies of history, where good intentions flounder and evil ends up serving the cause of good. In short all the complexity that is the stuff of politics.

But though this utopian way of engagement is unavailable, we cannot run away from the past that has made the present. What 16-year-olds study, should not be more sanitised than their newspapers. There is a pedagogic core in the third set of issues raised: what does reference to some marginal material that is subversive of tradition and conventional piety mean when students might not have inner grasp of those pieties in the first place? And in a complex society we will differ over what we judge to be important. Perhaps those disagreements are best handled by ending de facto state monopoly over textbooks.

Yet the new textbooks have innovatively made difficult pedagogic calls that are necessary if we want to surpass ourselves. One ought not to judge these new materials either in a partisan political frame, or by repeating the unmeaning pieties that for generations sucked the life out of history and political science. A student body provoked into thinking will learn the valuable lesson that liberal citizens have to exercise their own judgement. This is still a better outcome than the repression of argument, first by the old Left and then the RSS that produced its own pathological manifestations. The issue is not: Can we trust NCERT? It is: Can we trust our students?

(Pratap Bhanu Mehta is president, Centre for Policy Research, Delhi)