Education has no place for regressive ideas

Representative image. Pic/ istock

I n a widely circulated report, it was said that Shiv Sena Rajya Sabha MP Priyanka Chaturvedi this week wrote to Union Education Minister Dharmendra Pradhan seeking action on a book for Second-Year BSc students that has "derogatory" remarks against women. In her letter, Chaturvedi said ‘Textbook of Sociology for Nurses' lays down "merits and advantages" of the dowry system.

She said one of the so-called advantages of the dowry system, as written in the book, states, "Because of the burden of dowry, many parents have started educating their girls. When girls are educated or even employed, the demand for dowry will be less. This is an indirect advantage." Appalling though this is, there is more to come, with lines from the book cited in the report as reading, "ugly girls can be married off with attractive dowry with well or ugly looking boys."

She has quite rightly said the circulation of such "regressive textbooks" should be immediately stopped.

As early as 2017, this newspaper had highlighted in a report how a medical textbook had labelled lesbianism as a perversion calling those who "indulge in it" as "mental degenerates". There were other such shocking statements about the queer community.

Our textbooks need to be better whetted and only then introduced into the curriculum. We have to recognise the dangers of such statements inside textbooks. While some students may ‘reject' the ideas within the book, by definition a textbook is your book of learning for that class.

Many students will imbibe what is in the textbook and make that their own. Even though students may ‘question' since it is in the text, even examination papers may be based on that and students may have to put down the ‘regressive' answer to be marked right. Get these books off the curriculum and ensure no repeats, that is all there is to it.