The problem is not just what history textbooks teach, but also what they don’t

Why in the News

School history has been promised as training in analytical skills, but the new Grade IX chapters deliver lists of events and religious conflicts without explaining how the past worked. The National Council of Educational Research and Training (NCERT) released the book, ‘Understanding Society: India and Beyond, Part 2’, last week, the latest contestable revision.

What is a history lesson meant to teach?

1. What history is: History explains how societies reached the present and how life was once organised. It is like tracing a river to its source, not naming towns along it.
2. Processes and ideas: History should show how metals, fire, agriculture, the wheel, alphabets and money transformed life, and how ideas such as justice, equality and democracy did too.
3. What went wrong: Periodic textbook revisions have brought fictitious narratives, erased or abridged important periods, and added factual errors and self-contradiction.
4. The takeaway: When processes are skipped, history shrinks into a communal story, told through religious division, of antagonistic groups forced to share one territory.

What does the new textbook leave out?

1. Chronology without concepts: ‘India’s Long Road to Independence’ lists assorted events in order and never defines colonialism or nationalism.
2. Missing processes: The growth of literature, of capitalism and of constitutional reforms is absent.
3. Missing reforms: There is no mention of Lord Ripon’s local self-government initiative, the Morley-Minto Reforms or the Montagu-Chelmsford Reforms.
4. Unanswered ‘big question’: It asks how a diverse land came together to end nearly two centuries of British rule, then never addresses it.

Where does the textbook contradict itself?

1. No meeting ground: ‘Cultural Currents: 13th to 17th Centuries’ says Islamic invaders and local people shared no religious meeting ground until the Bhakti and Sufi devotional movements bridged it.
2. Contradiction on monotheism: It stresses a stark difference between monotheistic Islam and a religion of many schools. Pages later, it finds Islam’s oneness of god in the Upanishads.
3. Claim on veiling: It presents purdah and ghunghat, the veiling of women, as protection from invaders who enslaved women, citing the 10th-century traveller Abu Zayd.
4. Sanskrit drama disagrees: Sanskrit plays already show veiling. In Bhasa’s ‘Pratima’, Rama asks Sita to remove her veil; in Sudraka’s ‘Mricchakatika’, Sarvilaka veils Vasantasena.

Is the real problem factual errors or what history is taught?

1. Errors are fixable: A learned teacher can easily correct factual mistakes in class.
2. Shift in emphasis: The deeper problem is that books now glorify certain periods (lionised accounts) and show the past as religious antagonism, so students are asked fewer questions.
3. Outcomes without processes: Students learn results but not how they came about:
   • soldiers marching, but not how armies were fed or armed;
   • ancient high-quality steel, but not how the furnaces worked;
   • Vedic fire sacrifices, but not how fire was made without matches;
   • astronomy, but not what an armillary sphere (a model of rings showing the sky’s circles) is;
   • Bankim Chandra’s Anandamath, but not how schools made children able to read it.
4. Schools as history: Schools that made Indians literate over the past 200 years helped make modern India, a lesson for textbook committees.

Challenges

1. Opaque revisions: Changes arrive without published reasons or review. Eg. NCERT’s 2022 ‘rationalisation’ dropped a Mughal court chapter.
2. Teacher dependence: Correcting errors needs trained subject teachers, whom many schools lack.
3. Rote learning: Lists of events reward memorising over inquiry.
4. Centre and State friction: Contested NCERT changes push States towards their own material. Eg. Kerala’s supplementary textbooks of 2023.

Way Forward

1. Transparent committees: NCERT should publish its textbook committees and the reasons for each revision.
2. Expert peer review: Academic historians should review chapters before release.
3. Teacher training: Train teachers in source-based inquiry.

Conclusion

The contest over school history is less about single errors than whether students learn to ask how the past worked. Whether NCERT opens revisions to expert review and builds chapters around processes will decide what the new books teach.

School curriculum and textbooks in India

1. NCERT: An autonomous body set up in 1961 that prepares model school textbooks, used by Central Board of Secondary Education (CBSE) schools and many States.
2. Current framework: The National Education Policy (NEP) 2020 led to the National Curriculum Framework for School Education, 2023, on which NCERT’s new textbooks are based.
3. Shared subject: The Constitution (Forty-second Amendment) Act, 1976 moved education to the Concurrent List, so States can write textbooks through State Councils of Educational Research and Training (SCERTs).

Matching Previous Year Question

“[2026, GS2, 15 marks] Should education be treated primarily as a welfare obligation of the state or as a strategic investment for building a globally competitive, knowledge-driven nation? Critically evaluate.”