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Unit 10: National Curriculum Framework (2005)

Notes

The attempt is to furnish a narrative that in some way ‘corresponds’ to reality.

10.5 Recreating Knowledge

These capabilities, practices, and skills of understanding are what we seek to develop through
the school curriculum. Some of them readily lend themselves to being formulated as ‘subjects’
of study such as mathematics, history, science, and the visual arts. Others, such as ethical
understanding, need to be interwoven into subjects and activities. The basic capabilities of
language require both approaches, and aesthetic understanding also readily lends itself to both
approaches. All these areas require opportunities for project activities, thematic and
interdisciplinary courses of studies, field trips, use of libraries and laboratories.
This approach to knowledge necessitates a move away from ‘facts’ as ends in themselves, and a
move towards locating facts in the process through which they come to be known, and moving
below the surface of facts to locate the deeper connections between them that give them meaning
and significance. In India, we have traditionally followed a subject-based approach to organising
the curriculum, drawing on only the disciplines. This approach tends to present knowledge as
‘packaged’, usually in textbooks, along with associated rituals of examinations to assess,
knowledge acquisition and marks as a way of judging competence in the subject area. This
approach has led to several problems in our education system.

10.6 Children’s Knowledge and Local Knowledge

The child’s community and local environment form the primary context in which learning
takes place, and in which knowledge acquires its significance. It is in interaction with the
environment that the child constructs knowledge and derives meaning. This area has generally
been neglected both in the conceptualisation of textbooks and in pedagogic practices. Hence, in
this document, we emphasise the significance of contextualising education: of situating learning
in the context of the child’s world, and of making the boundary between the school and its
natural and social environment porous. This is not only because the local environment and the
child’s own experiences are the best ‘entry points, into the study of disciplines of knowledge,
but more so because the aim of knowledge is to connect with the world. It is not a means to an
end, but both means and end. This does not require us to reduce knowledge to the functional
and immediately relevant, but to realise its dynamism by connecting with the world through
it. Unless learners can locate their individual standpoints in relation to the concepts represented
in Textbooks and relate this knowledge to their own experiences of society, knowledge is
reduced to the level of mere information. If we want to examine how learning relates to future
visions of community life, it is crucial to encourage reflection on what it means to know
something, and how to use what we have learnt. The learner must be recognised as a proactive
participant in his or her own learning. Day after day children bring to school their experiences
of the world around them the trees that they have climbed, the fruits they have eaten, the birds
they have admired. All children are alive to the natural cycles of day and night, of the weather,
the water, the plants and the animals that surround them. Children, when they enter Class I
already have a rich language base of small numbers, and the rudiments of operations are
already in place. Yet rarely do we hear the knowledge that they already have and which they
bring into the classroom.

10.7 School Knowledge and the Community

Experiences of the socio-cultural world also need to become a part of the curriculum. Children
need to find examples of the plurality of peoples and ways of life represented in the textbooks.

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