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Excerpted from the book Learning from Conflict by Krishna Kumar,
Children are deeply aware of social conflicts, and this awareness makes them anxious about the future, but they seldom find opportunities to express their anxiety. Even more seldom do they get the opportunity to discuss and probe social conflicts. I wish to narrate an incident to illustrate this point. It occurred on the day schools reopened in Delhi after the riots that followed the assassination of Mrs. Indira Gandhi at the end of October. During the days of these ghastly riots, it would have been hard to find a child who had not seen columns of smoke on Delhi’s horizons. It would be difficult to count the number of children who had witnessed scenes of brutal killings with their own eyes, but we can guess that their number must be in tens of thousands. The tension and insecurity that people-leaving aside the killing hordes and their leaders, of course-felt irrespective of their religious backgrounds, were so obvious in every locality that it was hardly necessary for children to guess why political leaders were asking over television to stay calm. On the contrary, children who were not part of the families attacked by mobs, wanted to know from their leaders why such violence had erupted, why innocent people were being killed, why the police were not stopping the killers, and so on. During the days when rioting was on, all educational institutions remained closed. But even after peace and order were restored, and other social and state institutions re-opened, schools remained closed. It was after a fortnight of closure that schools were permitted to start functioning again. The day the incident that I am about to narrate occurred was the first day children were at school after the assassination.
Orders had been issued to principals to make sure that children did not discuss the riots in their classes. Apparently, these orders were given to convey the idea that normalcy had been restored, so the normal curriculum was what the teachers should follow. One of my trainee teachers was supposed to teach English in grade six, which meant that she would do the normal things an English period is supposed to consist of, such as reading a textbook lesson paragraph by paragraph, becoming familiar with new words introduced in it, making sense of the context, and finally, doing the exercises given at the end of the lesson. The class I was sitting in followed its routine course, my trainee teacher sailed through the text with the usual cooperative participation of children. After making sure that children understood all the words that might be expected to be new for them, the teacher wrote some of them on the blackboard and asked children to use them one by one in extempore sentences of their own. The class followed the expected practice whereby children who want to read aloud their sentences raise hands and the teacher asks one of them to stand up and speak. One of the words to be used was ‘arrive’. Several children raised hands and the teacher asks one of them to stand up and speak. One of the words to be used was ‘arrive’. Several children raised their hands, indicating that the word was relatively easy for them to use. The teacher chose one of them, obviously at random, and he read out the following sentence: ‘When a Sikh arrived in Delhi, he was killed by Hindus’.
It was a perfectly correct sentence, grammatically, and as such there was nothing noteworthy in it; if anything, the teacher was expected to convey her articulate approval of the usage before asking another child to read out his sentence. But the teacher seemed stunned. The children and I saw her in a state of shock, standing virtually immobilized for several moments. As I reflected later on, in those moments she must have made an attempt to separate the grammatical correctness of the sentence from its moral odiousness. And then she must have recalled the orders conveyed earlier that day, that she was to ensure the absence of any discussion of the riots in her class. How could she ensure this without overlooking the horrifying bluntness with which the child’s sentence had recorded an event of the kind of which many could well have occurred. She was facing a serious dilemma; to choose between fulfilling the role of a teacher as defined by the institutional norms of the system of education, and fulfilling the expectations woven into the concept of a teacher which underlies the philosophy of education. The institutionally sanctioned role of a teacher does not necessarily negate or exclude these expectations, but nor does it always permit or promote their fulfillment. In this particular case, the permission had been articulately denied.
I have narrated this incident in order to make the point that institutional education in our country avoids imparting the knowledge of issues that involve conflict. It can be argued that the narrative I have given as an example of this general point does not prove it because it concerns an emergency, i.e. a situation in which a social conflict had actually flared up and had posed a serious law and order problem. An open discussion on sensitive social issues can exacerbate such a situation, therefore, the arguments goes on, the decision taken by Delhi’s educational authorities, and school principals to disallow discussion of the anti-Sikh riots was justified. A similar argument can be given to justify the order issued in the wake of the demolition of the Babri mosque at Ayodhya. The merit of this argument, especially its pedagogical merit, can be taken up later. First I wish to illustrate the reluctance embedded in our system of education to acknowledge social conflicts and to permit children to study them with a different kind of example-one which has no immediacy to it in the sense that a law and order situation has. An appropriate example will be that of a historical incident which might have been triggered by a conflict and which continues to be a subject capable of arousing children’s anxiety and curiosity. The fact that such an incident occurred a considerable while ago should qualify it for an objective and detailed study. Few incidents in our history can qualify as better examples in this context than Mahatma Gandhi’s assassination. One cannot think of any historical happening which arouses children’s natural curiosity and the desire to probe more than the killing of Mahatma Gandhi does. His stature in the history of modern India and the philosophy of non-violence that he advocated and practiced are two major factors which make children feel deeply puzzled over the manner of his death. Children want to find out why such an outstanding Indian, and one who espoused peace and love, had to be shot dead.
From a pedagogical point of view, this incident seems to present a great opportunity to encourage historical enquiry. What kind of answers do our children get from a widely used history textbook to their curiosity about Gandhiji’s assassination will be examined below with the help of an excerpt discussing this incident. The excerpt figures in the textbook of modern Indian history prepared and published by the NCERT for the children of class eight. Considering that the NCERT is our country’s apex institution responsible for shaping curricular choices, an excerpt from a text prepared by it can be described as an appropriate example of the kind we are looking for in order to examine how a historical incident resulting from conflict is perceived in our system of education. What makes this textbook especially valuable for this analysis is the reputation it enjoys, along with others in the series of history textbooks, as a model of what might be called a modern, scientific outlook. The excerpt dealing with Gandhiji’s assassination in this textbook is as follows:
Within a few months after independence, the Indian people suffered a great tragedy. Gandhiji had played an unparalleled role in awakening the Indian people, and had led them in their struggle for independence for long years. He was the greatest man that modern India had produced and one of the noblest in the history of mankind. It was under his guidance and leadership that India had fought for and achieved independence. That is why he is known as the Father of the Nation. He had devoted his life to the cause of Hindu-Muslim unity. When the communal riots broke out, he toured the riot-stricken area of Calcutta on the day India became independent. The killings of Hindus and Muslims and the partition of the country had caused him deep anguish. His message of love and brotherhood was not to the liking of some people. Their minds had been poisoned by their hatred for other communities. On 30 January 1948, a Hindu fanatic shot him dead as he was going to a prayer meeting. The Indian people who were just beginning to recover from the shock of the communal killings and destruction of the previous year were plunged into mourning. Jawaharlal Nehru said, ‘Light has gone out of our lives.’ Gandhiji had been a source of inspiration to a world full of strife, a man who upheld truth and humanity above everything else. He had come to be known as the Mahatma to the people of India and the world. He had devoted his life to the aim of wiping every tear from every eye, to root out suffering and oppression from everywhere. It was left to the next generation to make his dream come true.
We can begin our analysis of this excerpt by noticing that although it starts by indicating its focal theme (the ‘tragedy’ suffered by Indian people), the discussion of this theme is withheld until approximately the middle of the excerpt. During this holding over, the text describes Gandhiji’s greatness first in the context of the national movement, and then in the context of manking. The text now introduces riots as a subject of Gandhiji’s anguish. The sentence dealing with Gandhiji’s response to the riots calls them ‘communal’ riots. The only reason why a reader must interpret this euphemism to mean Hindu-Muslim riots is that the preceding sentence was about Gandhiji’s devotion to the cause of Hindu-Muslim unity. In order to find out if the textbook had established the synonymity of the term ‘communal’ with Hindu-Muslim in some earlier discussion, I scanned the section discussing ‘communal parties and their role’ in the preceding chapter which covers the national movement from 1923 to 1939. This section uses ‘communalism’ as a general category which includes the ideology of all organizations that focused on creating ‘tensions between the members of different communities’. Such organizations, the text says, included not just the Hindu Mahasabha and the Muslim league, but also Akalis who started an ‘agitation against the corrupt Mahants’. Though brief, this reference to developments in Punjab clearly suggests as if some communal organizations had a positive role. However, the text immediately tries to correct this impression by telling the reader that communal parties played a harmful role, that they were opposed ‘even to social reforms.’ Apart from carrying such contradictory comments, this discussion of communal organizations does not establish a synonymous relationship between ‘communalism’ and Hindu-Muslim conflict. A distancing device used in this discussion is also noteworthy. I am referring to the use of phrases like ‘there were’ and ‘there had been’ in the context of riots. As Fowler explains, such phrasing implies an inversion of the usual order of subject and verb. In the context of Hindu-Muslim riots, this kind of phrasing suggests as if Hindus and Muslims were killed by a third party. This distancing effect is further deepened by a sentence that appears in the context of partition: ‘Such wanton killing of innocent people had never occurred in the history of India before’.
The excerpt about Gandhiji’s murder goes to a remarkable length of bar the reader from grasping the plain fact that in communal riots it is the people themselves who turn into killers. In the sentence preceding the January 30 incident, the text talks about ‘some people’ who did not like Gandhiji’s message of love and brotherhood. The text does not tell us who these people were, nor the basis on which they have been described as ‘some’. In the second of these two sentences, the mystery surrounding these people thickens into confusion. Let me quote this sentence before commenting on it: ‘Their minds had been poisoned by their hatred for other communities.’ Whatever way it is interpreted, the sentence seems designed to prevent clear understanding. Up to the preposition ‘by’, one feels as if the minds of these ‘some people’ were not under their own control, i.e. someone else was guiding them. But then, after the preposition ‘by’, we read that these people’s minds were poisoned by something born in their own minds, mainly their hatred for other communities. Be it as it may, nothing which we have read so far prepares us to make sense of the news given in the next sentence. The news is that a Hindu fanatic killed Gandhiji. Going by the semantic orbit constructed by the text so far, two nagging questions arise. One, why did a man belonging to the category of ‘some people’ who were given to the hatred of the ‘other’ community kill Gandhiji who belonged to his own community? Two, what had Gandhiji done to deserve such pointed hatred of a member of his own community? The only answer that a reader can find is that Gandhiji was preaching ‘love and brotherhood’ (apparently between Hindus and Muslims), and that the Hindu man who killed Gandhiji was a ‘fanatic’. The text does not explain what that term might mean; perhaps it is expected that the teacher will explain this, but a question can be asked whether thirteen-year olds can form a generalized concept such as this, or whether they will perceive it as an individualized adjective for Gandhiji’s unnamed killer. We will discuss this theoretical issue in the next chapter.
The possibility that the man who killed Gandhiji was incited by Gandhiji’s message of love and brotherhood begs another question which is important because it leads the reader to a paradox embedded in the text. Gandhiji was preaching his message of live and brotherhood throughout his career as a political leader. Why did the message acquire at this point such poignancy or irritant value that it drove someone to shoot him dead? If the question refers the student to the peculiarities of the climate that the partition of India had created, the text hardly provides any clues to help the student in this direction. The earlier problem of deciding what a fanatic might be also remains. The textbook had said in an earlier section of this chapter that the partition was a product of ‘communal problems’. The paragraph on Gandhiji’s assassination also suggests that this tragic incident was an outcome of communal hatred. It would be logical to conclude from these two presuppositions that Gandhiji’s murderer would be a supporter of partition. If he was, why did he have to kill Gandhiji when partition had in fact taken place? The text makes no attempt to respond to this obvious question which arises from its own reconstruction of arguments and suppressed arguments. Instead, it moves on to describe what Nehru had to say over Gandhiji’s assassination. Following this, the text returns to its earlier theme of appreciating Gandhiji, but now it shifts from communalism to inequality and suffering. The reader is thus led fully away from his curiosity to make sense of Gandhiji’s brutal murder. The paragraph ends with a generalized, metaphorical naming of Gandhiji’s vision-wiping every tear from every eye. One can argue that this vision includes liberation from communal strife, but one can hardly say that this undifferentiated naming of Gandhiji’s vision arises logically from the preceding text. The last sentence, in fact, uses such a customary phrase that the mention of Gandhiji’s vision must also appear customary in the reader’s immediate retrospect of the previous statement. Indeed, the last sentence shifts the text entirely away from history, orienting it towards the ubiquitous ‘next generation’, a metaphor for the future.
I have concentrated in this analysis on problems of communication that arises out of vocabulary, grammar and the structure of arguments. It is important now to acknowledge that some of the difficulties of communication we have noticed are rooted in the structural features of the history syllabus in the final elementary classes. These structural features, which I will discuss in the next chapter, demand that a history text should move along without going into details. A uniform, rather than prioritized, treatment of events is what the syllabus requires the textbooks to provide. The syllabus aims at exposure to basic information about a period as opposed to analysis of a few major events with the help of details. Gandhiji’s assassination becomes just one more event in the long stretch of events marking the national movement. This explanation of the brief and sketchy treatment of Gandhiji’s assassination jars with the acknowledgement made at the beginning of the excerpt that the incident was a ‘great tragedy’ for the Indian people. The limited space assigned to the discussion of this event belies this description. So do the sparse and confusing facts which have been given to enable the student to make sense of it. IT may be argued that thirteen year olds cannot be expected to grasp the complexity of such an event, and that the concepts required to understand it are not fully formed in their minds. Such an argument would be highly ironical, given the fact that the excerpt we have examined uses difficult concepts such as people’s awakening, communal riots, oppression and fanaticism. Perhaps none of these concepts is expected to be grasped with any intellectual rigour, or else the text would not use them in passing, like so many shibboleths. The fact is that the entire textbook, and not just this excerpt, uses difficult ideas such as these without any point going into the possible meanings they acquire under specific historical circumstances. If these psychological capacities of the young reader are the criteria, such casual use of concepts ought to be less acceptable than the details of Gandhiji’s murder.
A more satisfactory explanation of the cagey treatment which the text offers to Gandhiji’s murder lies in the nature of the event. The explanation is that the event was related to a deep conflict in our society, namely the conflict between Hindus and Muslims. Gandhiji’s death stands out in history as a symbolic attempt to transcend this conflict, but this symbolism cannot be appreciated by young students of history because the system of education does not permit the conflict to be recognized in the first place. Denial of recognition to Hindu-Muslim conflict forces the text prescribed by the system to treat all events that might be rooted in the conflict in a furtive manner. The treatment might suggest that the text is hurrying through it, as indeed it hurries through all events, major or minor, given the nature of syllabus design which we have noted. This cause of the hurry may be true, but in this case the hurry also appears to be born out of hesitation to go over the details in a systematic, transparent manner. The confusion and the contradictions we have noticed in the text are a product of this hesitation, not the hurry which in fact masks the hesitation. The nature of the event forces the text to choose between forthrightness and reluctance. If a text were aimed at communicating to children the story and also the significance of Gandhiji’s murder, it could not possibly avoid delving into the web of details about Hindu-Muslim conflict, the politics of partition and the politics of Hindu revivalist organizations, and Gandhiji’s own frustration in the final months of his life. These details, howsoever briefly one might discuss them, are necessary for anyone who wishes to make sense of Gandhiji’s assassination.
The challenge involved in giving these details to children is not terribly different from the dilemma that my trainee teacher might have felt in those moments of shock concerning the use of the word ‘arrive’ in a sentence about a Sikh coming to Delhi and getting killed by Hindus. No quick and simple commentary could have made the event described in the sentence comprehensible. If one were to explain why the idea was so abhorrent, a cursory homily on the loss of inter-religious brotherhood would be of no use. Children present in that class had the experience of living through a period when events like the one described in that sentence were happening everywhere in the city. They might have been aware, as many children in Delhi were, that a great number of adults thought the riots to be a necessary lesson for the Sikhs. A popular argument in Delhi those days was that Sikh terrorists had killed so many innocent Hindus in Punjab, and now the Sikhs had killed Mr. Indira Gandhi, so the riotous acts of revenge were not without justification. Analysis of such an argument in the school might have been expected to wean at least some of the children away from its gross logic, but the ban imposed by the education authorities of Delhi on any discussion of the riots pre-empted this possibility. The ban can be described as a corollary of the reluctance we have identified in the history textbook to probe Gandhiji’s murder with adequate details.
There is an obvious implication of this reluctant approach. The implication arises out of the logic of the continuing debate on Hindu-Muslim relations. It would be a gross understatement to say that the debate concerns just the relations between the two communities. The fact is that it contains larger and vital issues such as the nature of the Indian nation-state, the politics that might sustain the nation-state, and India’s relations with Pakistan. We can identify two major perspectives in the debate. One I will call the ‘received’ perspective, and the other the ‘rival’ perspective. The naming of these two perspectives refers to the differential status that has been accorded to them since Independence by institutions representing state policies and authority. The ‘received’ perspective insists on viewing Hindu-Muslim relations against the background of broader issues pertaining to people’s yearning and struggles for happiness and justice. As we can imagine, this approach does not perceive Hindu-Muslim relations as being the central theme of Indian history since medieval times, which is precisely what the ‘rival’ perspective persuades us to accept. Those who uphold the ‘rival’ perspective believe that the full story of India’s past is not being told in our schools, mainly because of the dominance of the ‘received’ perspective. On just about every event that touches upon Hindu-Muslim relations, the ‘rival’ perspective claims to have more facts to reveal than what the ‘received’ perspective might acknowledge as facts. The list starts with the plunder of the Somnath temple and extends to current happenings in Kashmir. Gandhiji’s assassination is just one event on this list. Any hesitation on part of a text written from the ‘received’ perspective to share with children the facts necessary to make sense of Gandhiji’s assassination only makes children vulnerable to the ‘rival’ perspective. That is part of the dynamics prevailing between these two competing perspectives.
As we all know better now than we did a decade ago, the ‘rival’ perspective has a wide clientele. The media, both electronic and print, offer plenty of space to ideas representing the ‘rival’ perspective and to ‘facts’ that might support these ideas. The home environment of a large section of the urban educated classes, including the salaried, the professional and the trading and business groups, is suffused with narratives and commentaries made from the ‘rival’ perspective, on what happened in Ayodhya four centuries ago and what happened more recently. The ‘rival’ perspective is also reflected in the collective memories that have been ratified in this section of Indian society by powerful social movements and currents of opinion over the last one hundred years or so. The net outcome of this general diffusion is that in today’s socio-political atmosphere, the ‘rival’ perspective has become synonymous with the full and sordid story of just about every episode in history which the ‘received’ perspective has attempted to deal with in its sophisticated ways. The credibility of the ‘rival’ perspective is far higher in the so-called middle class than we may like to acknowledge. The vague, incomplete knowledge we found in the NCERT textbook about Gandhiji’s murder can be counted on to leave children all the more eager than they anyhow are to accept the ‘rival’ perspective. In cruel brevity, the ‘rival’ perspective blames Gandhiji for his own murder. It denies that his killer was a fanatic inspired by the institutionalized ideology of Hindu revivalism. It suggests that Gandhiji’s disappearance from the political scene was not such a bad thing after all since he was lionizing the muslim community and Pakistan.
Among writers of social history, adherents of the ‘received’ perspective seem to have interpreted the processes and tasks involved in pedagogic communication too simplistically, or perhaps they have ignored them altogether. They were probably content with the idea that they were telling the history which in their judgement was correct, and did not think much of the issues involved in deciding how to tell history to children. The quality of a text aimed at an audience of children depends on the writer’s ability to anticipate children’s responses. Two elements, which, in this case, might play a primary role in shaping children’s responses are: one, the character of children’s reasoning, and two, the children’s exposure to popular, including oral knowledge of history. We discuss in the next chapter that the child’s ability to use generalized concepts develops more slowly in history than in other school subjects. This slower development of reasoning in historical contexts makes it necessary for the school historian to dwell on events that he or she may include in the text. In many cases, the school historian may need to provide with special effort a generalized understanding of key concepts to be used in a discussion before starting the discussion. This requirement may well mean that school histories may have to provide for topic work or theme-based projects rather than merely observer chronological continuity. In any case, curriculum is nothing but a series of choices made under the demands placed by the social milieu on education and the constraints placed upon pedagogy by children’s psychology and the conditions prevailing at school. The narration and analysis of Gandhiji’s assassination may need far more than a paragraph, and perhaps a week or more to teach if these different aspects of the pedagogical situation are taken into account. The eminent school histories written from the ‘received’ perspective, laudable though they may be for the effort they symbolized at one point in the evolution of our education system, by and large failed to recognize the pedagogic situation in this complex sense. The excerpt we have analyzed is not a lone example: it represents a common failure-the failure to take note of the child’s point of view as a key aspect of the pedagogic situation. By ignoring the child’s part in learning, these history texts missed a major opportunity as ‘received’ texts of the historical knowledge offered them to counter the widespread use of the past for deepening and perpetuating the Hindu-Muslim conflict in the educated sections of Indian society.
When a text does not talk to the child, anticipating and reflecting the child’s mind, its message ceases to matter, and the deep structure of the child’s knowledge of history remains unaffected by the text. This deep structure is constructed by the child’s exposure to popular knowledge of history. This kind of knowledge becomes available to children by means of family and community lore as well as through the modern media of communication. Orally available knowledge is usually more flexible in the sense that it is less classifiable and therefore less analytic than the knowledge available through the written word. This characteristic of oral knowledge makes it valuable in certain areas of collective life, especially in the context of another feature of oral knowledge, namely its ability to provide relief from detailed and verifiable memories. Orally-stored collective memories seem to offer a special place to the vivid and the traumatic. Experiences of a traumatic nature appear to dominate the corpus of oral knowledge of the past. The knowledge of Hindu-Muslim relations in the history, to which children in many parts of northern and western India are exposed through family and community lore, illustrates these features in the extreme. I am not referring here to the collective unconscious, but rather the collective conscious which is orally reinforced, sometimes-as in the present phase of our history-with a remarkable drive generated by political and cultural means. The orally reinforced collective consciousness abounds in stories of mass conversions, burning of precious books, demolition of places of worship, raping of women and genocides.
It is true that the task of predisposing children towards belief in these narratives has been attempted in the written media too. The ‘rival’ perspective is upheld by a fully-developed literate media, functioning quite independently of state media but often in tandem with it. For instance, school history books published by several state textbook corporations provide sustenance and legitimacy to the ‘rival’ perspective on Hindu-Muslim relations. An officially prepared school textbook of Maharashtra describes Shivaji’s greatness by stating that ‘Shivaji never molested Muslim women who fell into his hands. ‘ High school level textbooks used in Uttar Pradesh-in the version prepared long before the BJP came to power and initiated its controversial rewriting of history textbooks-contained several descriptions in which medieval rulers were presented as stereotypes of Muslim men. Even a textbook published by the NCERT, whose books are widely believed to be free of such stereotypes portrays Babar in terms that evoke a stereotypical image of Muslim cruelty. Such examples show that un-analytic, simplistic perceptions are not exclusive to orally constructed lore. Yet, the distinction between the oral and the written is worth making because the examples we have referred to –suggestive and unacceptable as they are, especially because they figure in school texts-come nowhere close, in terms of emotional value, to the stories that circulate on the subject of Hindu-Muslim relations in history by word of mouth in family and community settings. Oral media seem to represent the dominant mode by which the ‘rival’ perspective has expanded its social base over the last fifty years or so, including the last ten years during which it has made radically rapid strides.
The problem with school history books written from a consciously secular ‘received’ perspective is that they ignore the oral lore of Hindu-Muslim relations altogether. By not acknowledging that the lore exists and therefore needs to be addressed in terms of analysis and judgment, these history texts lose their moral authority. A text must have this kind of authority if we expect it to inspire and help children to scrutinize the knowledge they have acquired from oral and other sources available to them in their out-of-school environment. Losing moral authority and credibility, history texts representing the ‘perceived’ perspective get associated with success in the examination. The public examination taken at the end of secondary classes is itself a symbol of the state. The ‘rival’ perspective, on the other hand, remains associated with cultural truth, un-assailed by the elaborate narrative provided in the secular-minded textbook. Only by acknowledging the predominantly oral lore of Hindu-Muslim relations and setting it up for blunt analysis can school histories written from the ‘received’, secular perspective hope to counter the emotional appeal of the ‘rival’ perspective in the universe of competing ideologies.
Two arguments are commonly put forward against this kind of proposal. One is that the kind of directness and transparency that has been advocated here cannot be practiced with much hope of success in our society. Those who argue in this manner claim that the space for liberal ideas such as this one is very narrow, therefore history texts and other educational material cannot abandon their furtiveness in matters involving conflict, especially conflict of a religio-political nature. Such a belief extends, understandably, to justifying a ban on the discussion of riots in school, even to the withdrawal of an exhibition offering a pluralistic representation of Lord Rama from what might be called literally the best protected physical space in the nation’s capital. It takes no special intelligence to notice that such justifications make the liberal space narrower, not wider. The liberal outlook gains little by agreeing to be modest in a situation where anti-liberal voices are loud and assertive.
Even if we leave aside the wider issue of deciding how much liberal space there really is today in our political and social ethos, the old, historically constructed perception, that children must be kept away from knowing and enquiring into conflict, deserves an objective professional review. Children have always known that there is conflict in adult world. Psychologists tell us, and tellers of tales have always indicated that the child’s desire to look for order and coherence gathers strength from the knowledge of conflict. From a pedagogical point of view, no moment can be more suitable for studying conflict than the one immediately following the eruption of conflict, when pent up feelings, anxieties and questions are sharp, and when the child’s desire to encircle a traumatic experience by means of dialogue is strong. No external stimulation is needed to motivate children to probe the riots and expression of conflict at such a moment; all they need is the faith that they can do it, and the time and guidance to do it. Similar opportunities are required for studying conflict-ridden narratives of the past which seem connected with the present, such as the narrative of Mahatma Gandhi’s assassination.
‘Wouldn’t this kind of study politicize education?’ runs the second argument against the plea for directness made above. This second argument is often made in a generalized manner, against any form of ideological communication in education. Thus, while the first argument discussed above justifies furtiveness in dealing with conflict on the ground that the space for open, liberal dialogue is limited, the second argument implies that an open discussion of social conflict in schools will encourage ideological partisanship. At one level, we can respond to this second argument by pointing out that all educational activity has in it an ideological and political bias. Mass education exercises so deep a socializing influence on its beneficiaries that most of them become incapable of noticing the ideological bias embedded in their educational experience. There is ample and weighty historical evidence which points towards strong linkages between power relations prevailing in society and both the content and process of education. In our own case, the history of so-called modern education is inseparable from the history of power relations that developed under colonial rule. But let us assume that no one will put forward the argument under consideration in its extreme form. It is in its mild form that the argument attracts people and encourages them to question the desirability of exposing children to highly politicized issues. The argument implies that if we cannot avoid mentioning such issues in textbooks and classrooms, we can at least avoid discussing them.
This approach makes the role of adults-as parents, teachers and textbook writers-quite easy to perform. Indeed, the role becomes so easy to perform, one may well wonder whether it serves any purpose at all. The reason why children need adult help to make sense of conflict is because they do not have all the details and the concepts that might enable them to realize why the conflict arose and how it is being shaped. Children share with adults the urge to make sense of conflict; they want to ‘resolve’ it in their minds, in the sense that they want to identify the contradictions involved in conflict by referring them to a framework of ideas and values. There is nothing unique about this kind of intellectual effort; only, as adults we often mistakenly assume that children do not or cannot make it. One expects that institutionalized education, based as it is on professional perception of children rather than on commonly held assumptions about them, will assist to develop a framework for ideas and values by giving them opportunities to study issues which require such a framework to be applied with rigour. It is on matter of conflict that institutional education faces its highest professional challenge in this role. The earlier option of imparting superficial information on such matters impedes the development of professional capacities in the system of education apart from leaving a crucial need of the younger generation unserved.