A school without textbooks

We need to nurture skills, encourage children to engage with environment

An alternative schooling system that uses experiential and project-based learning

than a prescribed text book education system

In 1999, started Mahatma Gandhi International School in Ahmedabad, an alternative school that uses
experiential and project-based learning without prescribed textbooks.

Yet, after 18 years, our data shows that these children are faring as well, and in many cases even better,
than their counterparts who studied in schools with prescribed textbooks.

Children at the Mahatma Gandhi International School (a PPP with the Ahmedabad Municipal
Corporation) learnt through real life projects that they voted for or proposed and then prepared for
their exams in grades 11 and 12.

Traditionally in ancient India, learning was imparted by the “guru” and mostly to children of higher
castes. The guru’s position in Indian society was due to his spiritual and moral qualities as much as his
knowledge of texts that were imparted in an oral tradition. Till the British rule, village schools ran under
headmasters who decided on the curriculum based on the local context and resources. Though there
was an erosion in the hallowed status from the guru to the headmaster, the latter continued to enjoy
epistemic power and authority. However,

colonial rule took away the independent status of the teacher by centralising education with stringent
bureaucratic norms. This meant prescribed curriculum and textbooks with centralised examinations
along with government control over teacher appointments, promotions, and school budgets. Poor pay
scales and lack of autonomy further eroded the teacher’s professional status.

Furthermore, the teacher was no longer the sole provider of information. The textbook became the new
source of information and the teacher derived his or her power in the manner of use of the textbook.
This led to what Krishna Kumar, erstwhile director of the National Council for Education Research and
Training calls the “textbook culture”. A curriculum and a prescribed textbook are always political
playgrounds for competing ideologies. What goes into a textbook as well as what is kept out, is decided
by a bunch of people sitting somewhere away (both geographically and metaphorically) from our
children.

It takes a long time for new discoveries to make their way into textbooks. Sometimes, longer than 500
years. For example, the current map of the world we study in our textbooks is called the Mercator map
and was made by Flemish cartographer Gerardus Mercator in 1569. A new projection called the Galls-
Peter map made in 1974 shows how distorted the Mercator map is: Actually, Africa, South America and
India are larger, Greenland and Antarctica diminished and Europe and North America much smaller.
There is a debate about the “imperialist” bias and the “Eurocentric” vision that diminished the physical
size of the colonised world. Now that we have the technology, should not the map have changed in the
textbooks?

Educational researchers in India have long argued for a curriculum that takes the local context of the
child into consideration. In one textbook for English as a second language, in an area where poor tribal
children trek from forest areas and come mainly for the mid-day meal, often barefooted, I was shocked
to see that the teacher was supposed to teach a Robert Frost poem as part of the secondary school
course. No doubt some luminary had a romanticised idea of teaching English language through literature
to a group of children who could not even respond to “what is your name” after two years of studying
the language. Can we really blame the teacher in such a situation?

There is obviously the argument that all teachers may not have the wherewithal to create a curriculum.
In that case, textbooks created by local stakeholders together with researchers and innovative
educationalists can serve as a guide but not as a prescriptive truth. What should be developed and
nurtured are skills and processes through a wider consultation of a variety of sources from books and
internet to people. Instead, we have ritualised procedures in terms of definitions and formulae learnt by
rote from textbooks and regurgitated in a onetime exam. Little wonder that a NASSCOM report states
that only 15 per cent of the graduates in India are employable.

The National Curriculum Framework (NCF, 2005) and the Right to Education (2009) have brought
welcome reforms in terms of active learning, connections with local contexts and real life and learner
centric pedagogies. The NCF provides a framework for greater freedom for the teacher. But there
continues to be a gap between the policy and its implementation.

With new technologies, the textbook cannot be the sole source of information. The internet has
democratised knowledge making new skills of critical thinking and synthesis more relevant than just
factual information. A curriculum based on concepts is more universal. As the psychologist Jerome
Bruner argues, it is no longer problem solving but problem finding that is the key to a relevant
education. This is possible when children are engaged in experiential learning through interaction with
their environment. The nature of reality is complex and multi-layered. It cannot be be doled out in
standardised formats. It can only be grasped and understood by one’s own processes and in relation to
one’s own context.