[screye]

> The scarier thing should be the rewriting of the history section of CBSE.

That is the one I am looking forward to. Indian history today is freedom struggle - mughal empire - freedom struggle - mughal empire - gandhi - nehru - akbar. Is all.

Indian history is long overdue for a huge revamp. We need more balanced views of the independence movement. We need greater exposure to non-Delhi kingdoms that shaped the major parts of the country. We need history of the period between 1947 - 2000.

World history needs to be taught from a non-western lens too. India needs to learn about the East & Africa, just as much as the west. This is especially valid because Indians have closer historic ties to South East Asia and diaspora in places like Guyana, the Caribbean and Africa. With the advent of population genomics, we must include findings about Sub-continental pre-history that are more scientific than the idle musings of some 18th century white guy.

PS: good summary of the Indian educational system. As you correctly pointed out, western intuitions about education do not transfer well to the Indian system.

[alephnerd]

I'm not sure NCERT will ever be able to teach about ethnic diversity within India correctly - it's too politically loaded. For example, I'm Pahari. According to NCERT, we're a Hindi speaking ethnic group, though our Pahari languages are completely indecipherable to Hindi speakers (Eg. Sadh khol lal nukke heghe. Chaiyda tenu?) and we are classified as a different language group from Hindi. Similar reductiveness is applied to the "Hindi Heartland" by removing the ethnolinguistic diversity of Central India (eg. Bihar historically wasn't Hindi speaking until the 1970s because of Hindi oriented literacy programs).

If it's bad enough for highly represented regions of India, imagine less well represented areas like the North East, the Ghats, etc.

The big issue is NCERT and most grade school Indian historical education takes a very "Delhi" centric view of Gupta-Small Kingdoms-Delhi Sultanate-Mughals-British-Independence, but this chronological ordering is true for only a subset of India. South Indian kingdoms (itself a problematic term), Indigenous movements, the entire ethnographic history of the Northeast and the Northwest, etc all get ignored. That said, this is a bipartisan problem - doesn't matter if it's INC, BJP, whatever who's in power.

Also, there is a dearth of qualified teachers for the CBSE curriculum.

[AmIDev]

When I was in school(2002-2012), the Maharashtra state board history education was Maharashtra centric, not delhi centric. Most of the history lessons revolved around the maratha empire, their enemies. Few years were dedicated to freedom struggle, world wars and ancient history.

Even then though, there was very little about even other kingdoms who ruled present day Maharashtra, so there is clear need of diversity in history education.