How to teach history

Professor Krishna Kumar's book explores the practical challenges of teaching history within the constraints of timetables and textbooks

Learning to Live with the Past

Author: Krishna Kumar

Publisher: Seagull Books

Pages: 80

Price: Rs 299

“The use of social sciences in education is a conscious effort to create loyal citizens who are proud of their nation. This is especially true in modern nation-states, where the state takes charge of education and uses it as a tool for acculturation and socialisation,” writes Professor Krishna Kumar in his latest book Learning to Live with the Past, which contains revised transcripts of two lectures delivered before an audience of history teachers in 2018 and 2019.

The school curriculum is assigned the task of building a national identity — “a collective identity broader than caste, religion and language”— among a population that is as diverse as ours. Can a history teacher wave a magic wand and erase the memory of conflicts over generations? Do loyalty and pride come from educational transactions in a formal setting, or formative experiences that occur in one’s home and community prior to schooling, or both sets of contexts? Why is history such a contentious discipline? What kind of agency does a teacher enjoy in the classroom? Professor Kumar’s book will push you to think about these questions.

The author, who served as the director of the National Council of Educational Research and Training (NCERT) between 2006 and 2010, and taught at Delhi University’s Central Institute of Education from 1981 to 2016, invites readers to think critically about the idea that education — and the teaching of history — can contribute to peace in our society instead of taking the proposition at face value, regardless of how noble and hopeful it might seem.

While history teachers committed to their subject can foster a spirit of enquiry, teach students to examine and analyse evidence, and also encourage them to uncover the ideology behind various kinds of record-keeping, these teachers cannot wish away the fact that they work in a rigid system that prioritises syllabus completion and preparing students for examinations.

Even teachers who want to create nurturing classrooms — where all children can ask questions freely and fearlessly — have to swallow the unpalatable fact that they have signed up to be part of a system that rewards compliance, and not creativity. The author writes, “The functioning of schools as a modern institution involves the essential device of regimentation of the child’s body, mind and heart, which is used to reach the educational goals of the state.”

However, the author’s grouse with schools mandating the presence of teachers on school buses seems quite unreasonable. There are several news reports about children being exposed to harm through verbal bullying, physical assault and sexual abuse by seniors in unsupervised spaces. The presence of teachers on buses is meant to be a deterrent against such incidents.

What makes this book worth reading is Professor Kumar’s sensitivity to these everyday challenges that are all too real for history teachers, who have a timetable and a textbook to follow. Unlike scholars doing fieldwork and writing dissertations, school teachers do not have the luxury or funding to pursue purely “epistemological or intellectual goals”.  They also face competition from Bollywood films, Instagram reels, YouTube videos, WhatsApp messages — all part of “the entertainment industry which finds in history enormous fodder for its use”.

Building on research from his previous books —Prejudice and Pride: School Histories of the Freedom Struggle in India and Pakistan (2001) and Battle for Peace (2007) — Professor Kumar urges readers to reflect on how the education system imparts hostility and antagonism in the guise of consolidating a national identity. “If you are an Indian studying the history of the freedom struggle, then you cannot help but think of the Partition as something very sad,” he writes. However, Pakistani students learn about the Partition as “an escape” from “the Hindu Raj” that they would have been under if a separate homeland had not been created for Muslims.

While teachers who sow hatred in young minds need to be held accountable, Professor Kumar’s research with teachers from both countries made him realise that teachers who are assigned history classes in lower grades may not have an academic background in history. “Therefore, the question of whether teaching history alone can promote reflexivity and open-mindedness in a culture of regimentation requires careful consideration of the many difficulties involved.”

Learning to Live with the Past assumes a basic familiarity with thinkers like Jiddu Krishnamurti, Bertrand Russell, Maria Montessori, John Dewey, Jean Piaget, Lev Vygotsky, and Pierre Bourdieu, whose ideas are common currency among people in the fields of peace education and social science education. One hopes that a future edition of the book will attempt to engage a wider readership by including footnotes or at least a short bibliography for the sake of non-specialists. After all, Professor Kumar himself says that historians must engage more deeply with educators and other stakeholders involved in school education.

The reviewer is an independent journalist and educator based in Mumbai. He is @chintanwriting on Instagram and X