Friday, June 17, 2011

Fuming Furious Arrrgghh

Today was the first day at school of Sharmina, the 3-year-old daughter of one of our staff. She came to the office proudly showing off her brand new LKG school books, the "Little Pentagon" series published by Samba Publishers, Chennai.  I flipped through and found this gem.


The year is 2011.  It is 86 years since Periyar's self-respect movement; 64 years since Indian independence; 48 years since MLK's "I Have a Dream" speech. Can someone please tell me why the F*** we are still feeding our kids this crap?

8 comments:

  1. Never ending effects of a 200 year old colonial hangover.

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  2. My job has meant that I've had to read more textbooks in the last couple of years than I ever did in school. And yes, we are still feeding our kids this crap, over and over again. And reinforcing it in the illustrations in less obvious ways.

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  3. @aishwarya Is there any sort of movement anywhere to put an end to this? How do we start one?

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  4. Unbelievable! Letters to NCERT? The thing is, textbooks are so randomly chosen across kinds of schools, school boards etc., that it's impossible to have a unified action plan.

    Maybe a general petition that is brought to the attention of educators and principals of schools nationwide?

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  5. I think you just put people who care about this sort of thing into publishing houses. I make textbooks, and I would not put this poem into one of mine. And I've been lucky enough to have bosses who also will not tolerate this sort of thing.

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  6. @aishwarya Seems to be flourishing though. Maybe we need to get into kids textbooks.

    @spacebar This is a private publication, don't think NCERT is involved in any way (though I have some seen plenty of weird stuff in NCERT books.) General petition: want to write one?

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  7. In a couple of weeks, sure. Will draft and bung in the mail. (Seriously).

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