FATWA ON SCIENCE EDUCATION^*

At the Kolkata History Congress in January 2001, Prof. Amartya Sen described the spirit and discipline of history as `capacious heterodoxy’. He elaborated that `in order to study history, we have to have a sense of space — that there could be different ways of looking at past events . . . . . .’ Heterodoxy meaning `departing from usual beliefs or established doctrines’, Prof. Sen says, is important because `understanding history requires different approaches.’ Little did Prof. Sen know then that this beautiful concept of `capacious heterodoxy’ could be stretched by the Government of Madhya Pradesh to such an extent that it would almost amount to promotion of falsehoods and disinformation. This is exactly what emerges when you examine the fatwa issued by the Madhya Pradesh Secretary of Elementary Education on July 3, 2002 and a so-called `assessment’ document issued by the Chief Minister’s secretariat about a week later as an afterthought. The Government order has directed that the 30-year old nationally and internationally acclaimed Hoshangabad Science Teaching Programme (HSTP), being conducted in all of the middle schools (classes VI to VIII) of the Hoshangabad District, be terminated forthwith. This means that HSTP’s inquiry-oriented, experiment-based and environment-related child-friendly pedagogy will be replaced by the routine rote-based and over-burdened science curriculum operating in rest of the State. To be sure, this scientific pedagogy of learning science is not practised on a macro-scale anywhere else in the country, not even in the elite metropolitan public schools. What is particularly disturbing about the government decision is the cynical manner in which truth has been manipulated to malign a progressive intervention in science education. Also, the State Government’s attempt to obliterate a unique and legitimate space created and nurtured for HSTP within the Government school system has given a nation-wide alarming signal to the academic community and civil society groups striving for educational reforms.

The Government order of 3^rd July refers to the District Planning Committee (DPC) meeting held in February at which the so-called `unanimous’ decision was reportedly taken to recommend the closure of HSTP. What the order chooses not to refer to is the fact that nine out of twelve voting members later sent written submissions to the Collector-cum-Member Secretary of DPC seeking a review of the previous decision. Several of the members described how children enjoyed `learning science by doing’ and how they acquired a better understanding of scientific concepts through this approach and that the method was critical for developing scientific temper. No wonder it has been commended by the Indian Science Congress and several leading scientists of the country including Prof. M.G.K. Menon, Prof. Yash Pal and Prof. Jayant Narlikar. At the next meeting of DPC held in May, it was decided to wait for the outcome of the review of HSTP as promised by the Chief Minister earlier in the Vidhan Sabha. The ill-conceived Government order cleverly avoided any reference to the reversal of the earlier DPC decision as this would have taken away the legitimacy which it seemed to draw from the Zila Sarkar legislation on decentralized governance.

The order pretends to overlook the fact that the recent malicious campaign against HSTP was orchestrated by a local BJP MLA with strategic support from the then Congress Minister in-charge of the District and DPC Chairperson. This pretension enabled the Government to claim that the decision to force the closure of HSTP without an academic review was taken at the behest of DPC. However, as the above experience reveals, the State legislation for the Zila Sarkar has been designed such that the DPC is more like an extension of the executive arm through which the feudal and regressive socio-political powers continue to rule the roost in collusion with the willing members of the IAS bureaucracy.

The above-mentioned official `assessment’ document strangely deals more with Eklavya, the voluntary body leading the HSTP intervention in the Government system since 1982, than with HSTP itself. For almost ten years before the formation of Eklavya, the intervention was pioneered jointly by Friends Rural Centre Rasulia and Kishore Bharati. This bureaucratic and non-academic `assessment’ essentially amounts to promoting the canard being spread about HSTP by a handful of local petty politicians, mostly of Sangh Parivar persuasions. The document raises three non-issues, with dangerous implications for the national education policy. First, the learning outcomes of education are equated with children’s performance in Board and PET/PMT examinations which no educationist worth her or his salt will ever do. Why is the State educational bureaucracy reluctant to compare the learning outcomes in the HSTP and non-HSTP schools at class VIII level with respect to the attributes of the scientific mind, instead of insisting upon the long-defunct colonial parameters of the Board examinations? Second, the historic partnership in school education between voluntary bodies (such as Eklavya) and the State Government is suddenly being viewed as a `tenant-landlord’ relationship. The State Government would rather throw out the `tenant’ viz. Eklavya, than collaborate with it to reform the uninspiring curriculum for elementary schools at the State level. Third, it builds up an unsustainable theoretical model to claim that DPC magically transforms the traditional relationship between the school, government and the civil society, allowing greater social control over school. This claim ignores the fact that the Zila Sarkar legislation does not empower the DPC to take any decision relating to curriculum, pedagogy, teacher-training or examinations.

Does the State Government also view World Bank and European Union as `tenants’ both of whom have been directing the elementary education policy of the State since 1994-95? Or is the `tenant-landlord’ metaphor used only to evict Eklavya from the Government school system? Ironically, the educational space that Eklavya occupies today was created and nurtured by a series of predecessor Congress governments of the past three decades. This space is now enigmatically being termed as `illegitimate’. In contrast, the space from which the World Bank and European Union exercise their hegemonic control over the education scenario of not just Madhya Pradesh, but also of a large part of the country, continues to be legitimate! Fortunately, HSTP predates World Bank’s take over of Indian education policy by at least two decades. It represents a truly indigenous endeavour of national academia, engaging scientists, educationists, University and college teachers and more importantly the school teachers and children of Hoshangabad and 14 other Districts of Madhya Pradesh.

We may recall here that the BJP Government of the former Chief Minister Sundarlal Patwa also tried to close HSTP in 1992 but failed. It is ironical that what the BJP Government could not do then has been `effectively’ managed ten years later by a local BJP MLA by wielding an inexplicable influence over the present Congress government. Chief Minister Digvijay Singh must be knowing that termination of a programme that promotes scientific temper will only facilitate the growth of obscurantist thought and religious fundamentalism. This decision of the Congress Government has particularly retrogressive implications when examined in the background of the BJP-led Union Government’s hindutva agenda for Indian education and the recent introduction of irrational courses such as pourohitya and jyotish at the university-level. Indeed, one expected the Congress Government to have extended HSTP’s scientific and child-friendly pedagogy for re-constructing the curriculum of the entire State. Unless the Chief Minister intervenes decisively, more than one lakh children `learning science by doing’ in almost 1,000 schools of 15 districts of Madhya Pradesh will soon be brutally ordered to stop asking questions, inquiring, observing, analyzing, conducting experiments and evolving scientific concepts. They will instead be tragically forced to resume rote-learning science like crores of their peers in the rest of the country.

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