Itihasa made itihasya...

In the euphoria among the progressive circles over the passage of the Right to education Bill (RTE), many do not appear to have taken cognizance of or are perhaps oblivious to a more regressive directive of CBSE. This directive of CBSE called CCE expects teachers to be constantly evaluating (you can even call it policing) their students under so many parameters. This I argue is antithetical to any genuine learning and understanding. It once again puts tremendous pressure on school teachers who are more likely to be spending much of their school hours (and post school hours as well) filling in details and churning out data in vast quantities. Teachers will be left with little time to dwell on any subject or topic, to be creative, to experiment and engage in any meaningful dialogue with children. Rather than helping students to be deeper learners, thoughtful and reflective individuals, measures such as CCE  with its emphasis on mere generation of data and numbers,  reduces learning to a

Over the years while dealing with different chapters in history, we come across constant references to occupations and trade where artisans evidently had a major role to play. Like for example we constantly read about textiles, jewellery, metalware, pottery either being unearthed in archaeological digs or references to all this in varied literary sources. All these are meant to indicate the richness of material culture of a given period and societies. And there is farming too. If even today nearly 60% of India is directly or indirectly dependent on farming...in the past, societies across the world were largely agricultural. Surplus could never be taken for granted till the 1800s and it is no accident that much of the rapid, intense and extensive technological changes leading to shifts in occupational profile happened only from the beginnings of the 19th century. But more to the point here - some time back few kids were doing a project on Mughal textiles - the chikans, zardozi, brocade

The domain of social sciences in India, history in particular, is in a state of crisis. It's a subject hardly pursued by anyone, by any 'self-respecting' person if I may add, for not only is history seen to be useless, irrelevant in terms of its epistemological status (for what use is past and its study?) but seen to have little economic value. While there may be some merit in the latter argument, the former perception emerges out of erroneous understanding of the subject matter of history. With my experience in teaching history at different schools largely in mofussil parts of south India I have discovered (and discovering in a slow and painful way, I must add) that history can be everything that a mathematics or sciences could be and more viz it could be stimulating, relevant and yet complex. Here I seek to share all my efforts in nurturing historical thinking among the young minds of different schools, and put it across on the web which I hope will be a forum of all like