The callousness with which educators subject our schoolchildren to misinformation by way of textbooks deserves to be condemned. The least expectation in this crucial area of educating young minds and preparing them for the world is due care in picking what they read and what they experience.
To have a textbook, avowedly not commonly prescribed across CBSE schools but restricted to a few in northern India, put down meat eaters with a venom that would have done a vegetarian yogi subsisting on Himalayan herbs proud. Where such ideas popped up in an author and how they were allowed to figure in a school textbook for Class 6 is beyond comprehension. This is the worst ever case of carelessness on the part of academia.
The lesson is very clear. As society evolves, new sensitivities come into play and a continuous review of school texts is needed. Whether it is Ambedkar being made fun of in a cartoon or history lessons putting down communities, as in the case of the Nadar community which has been categorised as belonging to a “lower caste”, what is clear is too little attention is being paid to weed out such references.
Far from being an occasional aberration, what the insensitivity points to is that NCERT is not doing enough as a watchdog. Individual schools also cannot shy away from responsibility, especially when they are in charge of prescribing texts for the junior classes. There is no need to add to the misinformation, or disinformation, that may already exist in various new media like the Internet.