Historian Romila Thapar slams UGCs curriculum draft

Eminent historian Romila Thapar has strongly criticised the University Grants Commission (UGC)’s Learning Outcomes-based Curriculum Framework (LOCF), warning that it represents an intrusion into college autonomy and a dilution of educational high quality.

She additionally cautioned that the proposed framework, in its present type, might threat lowering greater training into rote studying with college students confined to question-and-answer codecs, as a substitute of being inspired to lift vital questions.

Prof. Thapar’s critique is a part of Kerala’s formal response to the Union Education Minister and the UGC. She was particular invitee within the Prabhat Patnaik-chaired professional committee fashioned by the Kerala State Higher Education Council to review the draft doc.

Draft UGC curriculum places concentrate on ‘historic knowledge’

The famous tutorial emphasised the necessity to entrust universities with the choice on what’s to be taught and researched. “The syllabus and what’s to be taught and the way in every self-discipline is the priority of the person college and isn’t to be dictated to by the federal government. These are issues during which a specialised and superior information is required; one thing that clearly directors and politicians do not need,” she acknowledged, including that non-specialists lack the superior and up-to-date information that’s required to design efficient curricula.

Referring to the UGC’s remedy of the idea of modernity, Prof. Thapar instructed a extra nuanced strategy by dividing it into two phases. The first part should ideally contain the mental historical past of Europe from the seventeenth century onwards in debates on rational ideas by philosophers, whereas the second part is additional superior by each the Industrial Revolution and colonialism. Both, she famous, have deep implications for the financial system, social change, and India’s colonial expertise, and have to be critically studied.

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The historian additionally raises objections to the perceived lack of readability and tutorial rigour surrounding ‘Indian Knowledge System’ within the UGC draft doc. She argues that there was no correct definition or analytical framework to elucidate what constitutes the idea.

Prof. Thapar’s criticism centres on the prevalent use of texts similar to Kautilya’s Arthashastra, usually quoted as a consultant work of historic Indian thought. However, she factors out the uncritical means during which such texts are utilized throughout huge chronological spans, from 500 BCE to 1000 CE, with out contemplating the altering social, political and mental contexts that formed them.

The Indian Knowledge System, she opined, can’t be handled as solely a Hindu contribution. “Even if a few of the texts have been composed in Sanskrit, there was, throughout the first and early second millennia AD, a substantial trade of concepts on proto-science throughout India, west Asia, central Asia and China. These concepts can’t be given a geographical boundary or a spiritual origin,” she asserted.