Why is Maharashtra Surrendering its Own School Curriculum and Textbooks?

In a rather abrupt development, the government of Maharashtra announced that the state board schools will now adopt the curriculum developed by the Central Board of Secondary Education (CBSE). The state board-run schools are to begin aligning with the textbooks developed by the National Council for Educational Research and Training (NCERT). 

This change is set to be in effect from the new academic year, which begins in a couple of months. Addressing both the houses of the legislature, the Maharashtra education minister Dada Bhuse unveiled the plan to phase out the state board curriculum and textbooks for classes I-XII by 2028.

The Maharashtra Board of Secondary and Higher Secondary Education currently enrolls the largest number of students in the country. This move will immediately affect more than 2.1 crore students and 6.8 lakh teachers in more than 1.11 lakh schools under the state board. 

The State Council for Education Research and Training (SCERT) Maharashtra and Balbharti, the state’s bureau of textbook production and research, have long been involved in curriculum and textbook development. In fact, Maharashtra is the only state in the country that produces school textbooks in eight languages including Marathi, English, Kannada, Urdu, Telugu, Hindi, Sindhi and Gujarati. Given that the strong infrastructure for curriculum development is available in the state and that the Balbharti textbooks have undergone some changes in the past few years,  this decision appears to have occurred without much serious thought and planning.  

The rolling out and rolling back of bilingual textbooks, introduction of integrated textbooks, and insertion of blank pages to accommodate notebooks, are a few examples of the back-and-forth in the state textbooks over the past few years. Without waiting to stabilise these changes, the government has gone ahead with yet another change undoing its own previous work. These moves beg a simple question: Are textbooks the matter of hurried experimentation? 

The decision has been defended on two fronts: quality and competition. It has been argued by the state’s education minister that CBSE board and NCERT books are of better quality than those of the state board.

In our country with its diverse and complex history of education, should we not prioritise a pluralistic understanding of quality? Does quality stand for a shorthand for aligning with central institutions? 

This is not to absolve the state-level institutions of their accountability, but as one of the richest states in the country, can Maharashtra do better to strengthen its curriculum and textbook production units? 

The second reason involving competition has been used to indicate that the CBSE schools will equip students better in tackling the entrance tests and other examinations that have become integral to seeking admission in higher educational institutions. 

This begs an uneasy question: Are our schools autonomous places for learning, joy and enrichment or are they simply prep-schools for higher education? 

State schools, like other schools, have been incredible in shaping the minds of countless students, creating in them the love of learning and teaching. Maharashtra carries an important legacy of students from diverse backgrounds and schooling experiences entering the world of higher education. 

The concerns of quality and competition might be closely connected to the ways in which parents  are increasingly choosing schools for their children. Reforming the state board curricula and textbooks, rather than purging them, could be a step in the right direction

A lesson not learned

Maharashtra is the richest state in India. In terms of wealth, the Gross State Domestic Product (GSDP) of Maharashtra outcompetes any other state of the country and contributes to 13% of India’s GDP. 

Its inability to sustain and nurture its own curriculum and textbooks is neither due to resource limitation, nor is it because of a lack of  expertise in curriculum development. It is symptomatic of how the social sector is perceived in general, and education in particular. 

A valuable lesson can be learnt from Karnataka, which abandoned its own rich trajectory of curriculum development and chose to adopt the NCERT textbooks in Science and Mathematics from class VI-XII. 

This development took place in the last decade and, much like what is unfolding in Maharashtra today, this crucial decision was shrouded in administrative opacity without any prior rigorous academic consultation, reviews or incorporating teachers’ experiences. The same reasons of quality and competition were peddled.

There is no evidence of greater quality or competition-readiness after adopting the NCERT textbooks. In fact, the experiences of teachers reveal the struggles they and the students have gone through with the textbooks. 

Last year, we conducted a series of interviews with teachers in Karnataka  about their experiences of the NCERT textbooks. “ … in sciences, (…) the textbooks are more information-laden or are more heavy on facts as opposed to providing space for how to develop observation skills, how to think about an experiment,”  a teacher with over three decades of experience told us. 

Another teacher draws attention to the translation-driven changes in the revised textbooks. “The language used in textbooks is not child-friendly. They find this difficult to connect [with]. Thus, language used in textbooks creates a barrier for a child to connect to a concept.” 

Teachers following these textbooks need to first make the language accessible to their students. The non-relatability of the language often leads to students resorting to rote learning as a way to cope. 

What gets lost when textbooks are imported without much thought in our schools? As the Karnataka experience tells us, such moves put enormous burdens on teachers and students alike and there is no evidence that they improve learning. 

When such hurried experimentation goes unchecked, it weakens the state’s institutional capacity building. The Maharashtra government is not only abandoning its own curricula development and  multi-lingual textbooks, but also the schools that are run in Marathi (and other non-English languages).

The students of Maharashtra deserve better education and not quick fixes. Any serious intervention in the curriculum and textbooks should begin with periodic textbook revisions based on pedagogic considerations by an autonomous group of experts involving teachers and academics as well as the strengthening of state-level institutions and curriculum development units.

Shivali Tukdeo is Professor, Indira Mahindra School of Education (IMSE), Mahindra University, Hyderabad 

Subhankar Chakraborty is the publisher of Kannada monthly magazine Teacher and Vice President, Bharat Gyan Vigyan Samiti (BGVS), Karnataka

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