SANJAY MATHUR*
As teachers and house parents, we observe on a daily basis words and actions that indicate sensitivity, intelligence, fellowship, kindness, conviviality, respect, humour, responsibility, creativity, thoughtfulness and so on. At the same time, we observe insensitivity, rudeness, arrogance, harassment, bullying, timidity, dominance, judgement, envy, jealousy, disrespect, mocking, and abusive language. Dialogue and discussion with children, whether in class or hostel or the sports field, whether one on one or in groups or with the class as a whole, is necessary for the sake of a safe, healthy, and supportive environment, free of fear, in which all children may grow and mature to their potential.
It is without doubt that the school operates on the basis of certain values in order to function, such as the values above. But do we inculcate values in children? We do to a point, through dialogue and conversations, especially when we become aware of insensitivity or conflict between children. At the same time, we do not indoctrinate. We try and teach how to think, not what to think.
But what happens when children do not ‘flower in goodness?’ And is it enough to be friendly only to one’s own friends? What about those who are different than us? Whether that be a different religion, gender, nationality, class, caste, colour and so on.
We live in politically charged times, when politics has moved into the space of religion, fanned by social media, running roughshod over facts let alone sensitivity to others.
As a teacher of history and political science in senior school, it cannot but concern me to witness in the last two years:
- An entire classroom’s desks scrawled with either ‘Jai Shri Ram’, ‘Sanatani Hindu’, or ‘Hindu’ for a whole year (which I requested to be freshly painted when I took the room this year)
- The phrase ‘Jai Shri Ram’ written on the classroom bulletin board on return from Diwali break, which then inadvertently greeted a new Muslim teacher who taught at Jamia Islamia when the slogan was shouted in attacks on students and teachers in the anti-CAA1 protests in 2019
- In a discussion on ‘Religion in the News’ in Culture class with Class 9, that looked at threats to the respective minority communities in Bangladesh and in Sambhal, Uttar Pradesh, the back row in the lecture theatre erupts in ‘Jai Shri Ram’ after I tell them that the crowd marching to survey the mosque was shouting ‘Jai Shri Ram.’
- In the same discussion, in talking about how to keep communal harmony, one boy declares ‘final solution’ since we had just got through studying Nazism
‘Final Solution’ was the euphemism given by the Nazis to their plan to kill all Jews. Knowing the boy’s sense of humour, I suspect he said it spontaneously just to get his fellow students to laugh, to make himself look smart, and to go with the crowd. While I normally provide plenty of latitude for questions and comments, at that moment I said, ‘That is not appropriate, this is far too serious a subject.’ After class, I asked him, ‘You wouldn’t have said that had my co-teacher been here today, would you?’ He nodded that he wouldn’t have. My co-teacher is Muslim.
This is a large part of the problem. We have no Muslim students to speak of at the school. Had we only 10 Muslim students, in a school of 220, things would be different, I am certain. Besides a handful of Muslims on staff, including contract staff, we see Muslims daily crossing the lane that divides junior school and senior school. To wit, over the wall of our sports field is a dargah and a mosque. According to the 2011 census, 28 per cent of Varanasi’s population is Muslim. Hindus and Muslims have been economically dependent on each other for centuries, particularly in the weaving and sari industry. Yet we have no Muslim students. And, when asked, hardly any children have friends who are Muslim.
On occasions like these, I recall growing up in the United States from an early age and attending public schools that had every race and ethnicity— whites, blacks, Latinos, and Asians. We got to know each other as people first. So, when I learned in schools that blacks had once been slaves, I was shocked. How could my friends, their ancestors that is, have been slaves? It made no sense to me.
Going back to Rajghat Besant School where I teach, those are just a few incidents and observations. There are many others. It is perhaps in the nature of teaching History and Civics/Political Science that brings these out. But more than this, it is what is in the news, what is in the newspapers in the hostel, what is in social media and on YouTube at home, what extended family, friends, and neighbours talk about at home, what politicians drum up and serve for us to consume, that triggers such incidents.
In that discussion in Culture class, I might note that I had prepared slides and links to two videos, one on victimization of Hindus in Bangladesh and one on the most recent attempt to convert a mosque into a temple in Sambhal, and which also explained the Religious Places of Worship Act of 1991. This is Class 9, so it was not surprising that no one had heard of the Act. Moreover, I had prefaced our discussion with the following slide:
- Sensitive topics require sensitive and respectful discussion.
- We must raise good questions and seek facts, understand different points of view, be willing to adjust our point of view, not just take sides.
- School is about questioning and learning even as we are developing our values and points of view.
- We should always be prepared to look at any issue freshly.
The class did serve to educate; and it also served to show that young minds have formed more than we think. Once topics like converting a mosque to a temple are raised, it is all emotions and ‘Jai Shri Ram.’ You can hear it in what is said and read it in the faces, gestures, and side comments. And yet, it is about a third of Class 9 who lean politically one way, including sons of politicians, a third who are against communalism, and another third who are neutral or indifferent. In Class 12, it is different. By that age, it is possible for students to support a particular party and yet condemn the communalism the party is a part of.
On an earlier occasion, with the same Class 9, we were learning about the role of elections in the functioning of Indian democracy, and this included the Election Model Code of Conduct. I happened to show snippets of election-time videos showing seasoned politicians making speeches in which they not only threw vitriol at each other but also alluded to the dangers their constituencies would face from people of another community, if they allowed any of the other parties to win. As children heard these speeches, many of them were stunned, no matter which political party they supported, and one boy whispered to another in Hindi, ‘This is a mistake.’
Why are some children able to perceive harmful rhetoric and others are not? How is it that identities form so strong so early?
I had a student in class who, knowing hardly more than the little we are made to learn about the Constitution in the textbook and whatever I supplemented, said he wanted to be a politician and that, if elected, he would change the Constitution. How does this happen? When he did well on the test, I said to him, ‘You have all the right answers, but you don’t really believe this, do you, you want to change the Constitution, right?’ He just smiled.
Just before the last day of studying Nazism, one boy informed me that a number of students in his hostel admired how Hitler ‘made Germany great again’ and how he conquered Western Europe in his famous blitzkrieg or ‘lightning war.’ He suggested we have a debate on Hitler, for and against. I said, let me think about it, thanks for telling me. The first thought in my mind was, well I’m not surprised, but how really is it possible? What are they not seeing? I had made clear, with emphasis, that the supporters of Hitler wound up dead on the battlefield of Stalingrad, for example, the largest battle ever in history, with one million dead in seven weary months, the fields littered with corpses, and that the Germans had lost.
Together, over three weeks meeting four days per week for forty minutes each class, we had learned about Germany after World War I, the Versailles Treaty which punished Germany for the war, the rise of Hitler and the Nazis, why they became popular and how they instituted dictatorship in place of democracy, took to aggression at home and abroad leading up to World War II. This was a war in which sixty million died including at least twelve million Germans and the ‘extermination’ of six million Jews and one million other ‘undesirables’ in concentration camps. We had taken the time to enquire into such questions as: Why did Hitler and the Nazis target Jews in particular? Why did people, including educated people, follow orders to kill even innocent civilians? What was education in Nazi Germany like? Is it easy to get people to hate other people—if not, how did the Nazis do it? What are the techniques of propaganda used then and still used today? If you were afraid to resist the Nazis openly, on fear of incarceration or of death, how could you still have resisted them? How do Germans look back on Hitler today, with pride or shame or something else? Much of what we talked about I had written on the blackboard plus given daily homework assignments and notes that I checked at the beginning of every class.
So, I decided to approach the request for a debate in a particular way. The following day, I first wrote the proposition, ‘Hitler was a great leader’, on the board. I then asked the children to define leader—and we could appreciate that the word leader is used not only in politics, government, and the military, but also there are business leaders, sports leaders, religious leaders, school leaders, and so on. Leader is not a title; it is a description that is earned. What then makes a leader great? Children listed many things such as listening to different points of view, being inclusive, recognizing when you have made a mistake, being effective at getting things done, leaving a place better than it was before, and so on. So then, was Hitler a great leader? Silence. No one had listed that a great leader was someone who made powerful speeches, targeted violence at the minority community, and conquered territory. So, the answer that he was not a great leader seemed too obvious. We then had a short debate anyway on whether Hitler was good for Germany or not. In the end, I emphasized again to children that Hitler led Germany to devastation. Or didn’t he? What does social media say?
Many changes have been made to NCERT History and Political Science textbooks, and more are coming. For now, however, we still have the Constitution, and the textbooks reflect constitutional values. What are these? It is worth listing, since these values are what the teacher has to stand on. Class 12 textbooks such as Themes of Indian History and Politics in Independent India give extensive weight and value to diversity in terms of social group or community, religion, caste, gender, language, native place, way of life, and so on. Class 9 textbooks Democracy Part 1 and Our Contemporary World thoughtfully include a critical analysis of democracy as well as an age-appropriate deep dive into the French Revolution, Russian Revolution, and Nazism. In all these texts, values of inclusivity (over and against previous exclusion), democracy (even in the face of valid criticism that is acknowledged), and even secularism (defined as an equal treatment of religions by the state as opposed to communalism) are endorsed.
The teacher, then, is free to endorse, even expected to endorse, values such as: political liberty, social and economic equality, fraternity between peoples, social justice, inclusion and not exclusion, democracy as an imperfect but still superior form of government, and an equal treatment of religions and not supremacy of any one religion.
Is this enough? Does this mean, if teachers adhere to the NCERT textbooks and miss no opportunity to highlight these seven values, that students will come out of schools as good citizens and that democracy will be served? We must be realistic even as the framers of the Constitution were realistic. It is worth reciting the famous warning of the President of the Drafting Committee, BR Ambedkar, in his speech to the Constituent Assembly on November 25, 1949:
The second thing we must do is to observe the caution which John Stuart Mill has given to all who are interested in the maintenance of democracy, namely not “to lay the liberties at the feet of even a great man or to trust him with powers which enable him to subvert the institutions.”… This caution is far more necessary in the case of India than in the case of any other country. For in India, Bhakti or what may be called the path of devotion or heroworship, plays a part in its politics unequalled in magnitude by the part it plays in the politics of any other country in the world. Bhakti in religion may be a road to the salvation of the soul. But in politics, Bhakti or hero-worship is a sure road to degradation and to eventual dictatorship.
In that discussion in Culture class with Class 9, at one point, I posed the question, do you think of yourselves as Indians first or Hindus first? ‘Hindus’ said some, ‘Indians’ said others, ‘both’ others said. Then a girl in the front row said, ‘Sir, human beings first.’ She got it! How is it that we can evoke this sense of being ‘human first’, and not get caught in limiting identities? We need to take every opportunity to help students develop a shared sense of humanity and relate to the deeper values that underlie the Indian constitution. Children are a reflection of their parents but also society. Society is a product of history. And, as teachers, we need to be faithful to all of history in its complexities and nuances, not just the ‘storyline’ of one community, people, or nation. Children who come to school must also expect to have their pre-existing beliefs on history and politics to be examined and, at times, challenged. Teachers too must examine their own beliefs.
The following quote from Krishnamurti is worth bearing in mind for any educator concerned with the individual and with society in the making:
My mind is rooted in the past. It is the result of time, of the past. The past is my tradition, my race, my culture, my history, my family, my name, my experience, my knowledge, my studies, what I have been taught, and so on. The whole of that is the me, the me which thought has identified as a separate entity, which it calls “I”. From that “I”, I function. The more that “I” is strong, violent, aggressive, expressing, demanding, pushing, driving, ambitious, the greater the conflict. That “I” is being encouraged all the time through society, through competition, through success, through various forms of psychological impressions that society pushes upon it. And society is created by this “I”—the society and the “I” are not two separate states, they are a unitary process.
—J Krishnamurti, Public Discussion 3, Saanen, 6 August 1964
As teachers, we need to be cognizant and self-aware of our own biases and prejudices, even as we relate with our students. As a teacher of history and civics it then becomes a further challenge to expose our students to diverse perspectives, help them question received beliefs and ideologies, think critically, and learn to explore their own human nature and deeper connection with fellow beings. Such is real education, and only such an education can sustain a sense of goodness in a democracy.
- Citizenship Amendment Act