1The educational policies of India were influenced by its anti-colonial struggle for independence, and the Gandhian system of ‘Nayee Taleem’ (New Education), which aimed for student participation and transformative action within the school and the community. Productive craft, such as weaving, carpentry or collective farming - which was the major components of people’s work and livelihood within a decentralised economy - was meant to be at the heart of the curriculum and the medium of interdisciplinary hands-on learning. The emphasis on manual work including ‘cleaning’ was also an attempt to challenge the vocational and social stigma of a hierarchical caste system, which relegates the ‘lowly’ work of scavenging to the ‘untouchables’ (Rampal, 2010). Indigenous alternative curricula based on decolonial visions of education linked to productive work, self-reliance, equity, and rural employment, were developed at the time in several other countries such as Ghana, Botswana, Cuba and Vietnam (UNESCO, 2005). The aim of education was resolutely humanist and emancipatory, to nurture citizenship with critical awareness of the structural roots of inequity and oppression, making explicit its underlying value system. The focus was on collective action, relating the self to a wider collectivity for transformative justice.
2After independence, in 1947, Nayee Taleem continued to inspire the national visions for education. The Secondary Education Commission of India (GoI, 1952), for example, called for transforming the ‘bookish’ school to a ‘work school’, and remove the walls that isolate it from life. Significantly, it sought a sense of ‘patriotism’ which was not based on hollow jingoistic slogans of ‘national’ praise, but one that subordinated the self for larger causes through cooperative practice and a passion for social justice. It reinforced the Constitutional commitment for education to nurture and deepen democracy; subsequent policies recommended a Common School System bringing different social groups together to promote the emergence of an egalitarian and integrated society. However, without seriously mandating this advice the state focused on the aspirations of the middle classes, and with inadequate financial allocations created a differentiated public system, with minimalist provision for the poor and the disadvantaged. The national curricula and textbooks tended to represent the urban world and reinforce inequities, as will be analysed through the subject of ‘Environmental Studies’ (EVS) at the primary level, which relates most to ESD.
3Rising environmental consciousness led the National Curriculum Committee to recommend in a 1975 policy document “The Curriculum for the Ten-year School: A Framework” that a single subject ‘Environmental Studies’ be taught at the primary stage, by integrating science and social studies. This new subject had the potential for an integrated approach on socio-environmental issues, but in most state curricula the integration was never done, and even the national textbooks contained several counterproductive aspects about social justice and ESD.
4The first problematic aspect was that the multiple contexts of learners were not acknowledged, resulting in implicit discrimination among them. Textbooks, for example, reflected a preoccupation with grooming and ‘cleanliness’, alienating poor children who could not afford soap, toothpaste or new clothes. This relates to the high-caste values of ‘purification’, as well as the pervasive and universal ‘civilising’ agenda of education. The conventional textbook maintains an inert distance and ignores less privileged children’s neighbourhoods, their lives and struggles. It also evades contentious issues seen as ‘uncomfortable’ by its middle-class urban authors, and unabashedly pontificates on what ‘they’ – the poor and the ‘unclean’ – must do to keep themselves and the environment clean, without presenting their agency and knowledge in the field of water conservation, as will be presented later. For instance, it would deal with the issue of water or housing assuming that everyone lives in a brick-and-mortar house provided with tapped water, and inanely preach ‘water conservation’, with taps not to be kept running while brushing one’s teeth (Rampal, 2007). However, even for those who may get running water, such innocuous messages pin critical issues of water management on individual responsibility, and obscure the deeper structural causes of the crisis and the related governance issues.
5Aligned with this, the second problematic element is the anthropocentric and extractive way to perceive the natural world, as instrumentally to only serve humans: the youngest child learns lessons on how ‘the cow gives us milk’, ‘sheep give us wool’, and ‘trees give oxygen’. How does one get past this, to look holistically at the environment through the eyes of people whose lives and livelihoods are tied to the forests, the sea, the soil? How do fisherfolk perceive the sea? What are their practices of sustaining its ecology, through their indigenous knowledge? How does one bring a nuanced understanding, through the lens of ecological justice, for human and non-human components and their interdependence, without succumbing to a paradigm of appropriating nature?
6The third problematic aspect is the understanding of environmental protection as divorced from social justice issues. This tends to support righteous notions of urban ‘green citizenship’, to clean cities of all ‘pollution’, endorsing large-scale demolitions of settlements of the repeatedly displaced poor. Elite schools even celebrate such an exclusive agenda on World Environment Day, thus ignoring the basic right to life of the poor and how they contribute to the economy and survival of cities. Conflicts of ‘the environment’ of an abstract undifferentiated ‘public’ thus promote an elite environmentalism of the privileged. For example, the privileged, looking at land not as a socio-ecological system but only for its commercial profit, would call for a ‘realistic’ use of real estate through the removal of ‘encroachers’ and ‘deviants’, such as hawkers, slums, street children and beggars, from public land, along with pollutants from air and water (Rampal, 2007).
7This type of environmentalism had influenced schools when, in response to a Public Interest Litigation, the Supreme Court mandated that a compulsory subject, with an examination, be taught in school, on the environment and problems of pollution. In 2003 a national syllabus for ‘Environmental Education’ was hurriedly drawn up for all grades, by the National Council for Educational Research and Training (NCERT). However, it was in a traditional ‘information-transmission’ form promoting memorising of definitions without understanding the concepts and issues. After NCF 2005 it was decided that these issues would be integrated into all existing subjects, instead of inventing yet another one.
8Decades of democratic people’s movements had pressed for a rights-based educational agenda and collaborated with the government to develop several programmes and policy documents. NCF 2005 drew upon some aspects of ‘Nayee Taleem’ and consciously addressed problems of the pre-2005 EVS curricula discussed above. ESD was embedded in the larger framework of transformative education for social justice and democracy, to ensure inclusive and participatory development. In 2009, the Right to Education Act provided the legal base for an equitable education for all, and an anchorage for the pedagogical approach chosen in NCF 2005.
9This approach continues to pose profound challenges, especially for ESD. How do we engage with social justice through nuanced issues of caste, gender, religion and ethnicity, while we face increasing private control on knowledge production and reproduction? How do we remove deepening hierarchies of ‘knowledge’ vs ‘skill’, or ‘academic’ vs ‘vocational’ education, especially when these notions are closely tied to social status and caste? How do we address the prevailing segregated and unequal school system which refuses to acknowledge diverse and disparate childhoods of students? Moreover, what vision for sustainable equitable development in the Global South encompasses a critical understanding of indigenous knowledge, based on subsistence economies of livelihoods and survival? Indeed, how should indigenous knowledge be appraised and understood, without falling prey to chauvinistic narratives, or mythologised traditions of imagined pasts?
10In addition to these structural issues, the question of social and epistemic justice within the curriculum was central. NCERT, responsible for translating NCF 2005 into textbooks, engaged an interdisciplinary transformative approach to EVS embodying social justice and environmental perspectives. So, for example, while the traditional syllabus on food discusses nutrition only in terms of carbohydrates, proteins, etc., the syllabus views food as a cultural construct, highlighting that food for one may not be food for another, to build an understanding about stark differences which can be used to polarise society in India. As part of food, hunger is included in the syllabus and textbook (Rampal and Mander, 2013), thus taking into account the reality of marginalised children and allowing an open discussion in class around how it feels to be hungry.
11The EVS textbook (chaired by one of the authors) thus promotes questions and discussion among students and the teacher, based on their lived experiences, on various ESD-related topics such as gender divisions of labour at home or at work; difficulties faced by farmers, high rates of suicide, changing crop patterns, debt and dependency on globally produced chemicals; depleted water resources and climate disasters increasingly affecting different regions of the country. It does not obscure children’s social realities or infantilise the curriculum, in the belief that children have to be ‘protected’ from the harshness of life, through awkwardly rosy, ‘sanitised’ and decontextualised texts. By encouraging their participation and voicing their experience in the textbook, they begin to reflect, question and discover multiple realities. Can young children talk about these issues? Why not? A large number of them live it; they know it better than most textbook developers; given a chance, they broaden the perspective of children unconscious of such realities.
12Indeed NCF 2005 calls for children’s ‘participation’ in the active construction of knowledge, mediated through culturally diverse lived experiences and knowledge traditions.
Child-centred pedagogy means giving primacy to children’s experiences, their voices, and their active participation… We need to nurture and build on their active and creative capabilities ... in relating to the world in ‘real’ ways through acting on it and creating, and in relating to other humans. […]
Critical pedagogy facilitates collective decision making through open discussion and by encouraging and recognising multiple views.” (NCERT, 2005)
13Epistemic justice and plurality are also fostered by the textbooks, constructed around narratives showing the value not only of academic knowledge, but the wide spectrum of street, artisanal, folk and indigenous knowledges, highlighting the agency of people otherwise perceived as marginalised. The mathematics book for example introduces sustainability issues in “The Fish Tale”, with a narrative of fisherfolk, who catch enough for sustenance and sell without over-exploiting. Issues of social justice entangle with livelihoods and environmental concerns, invoking elements of geography, history, art, cultural studies, biology and mathematics, so that the interdisciplinarity inherent to EVS is taken seriously. Two chapters can exemplify these features.
14The grade 5 chapter provocatively titled “Whose Forests?” (NCERT, 2008; 2023), begins in the voice of Suryamani, a real-life protagonist from a tribal community, who goes to a school far from home, hoping that education will empower her to save her forests. She says in the textbook, almost in Freire’s words, that ‘reading the forest’ is important, but normally missing in school knowledge. Presenting decolonial and indigenous perspectives on ‘natural resources’ and sustainable development, the textbook thus asks its young readers, urban and rural, what they think is a forest, why Suryamani calls it a ‘collective bank’, or why a student’s letter (reproduced in the textbook) to the Chief Minister of her state questions the clearing of their forests for government projects ‘in the name of development’. The textbook also urges teachers to encourage differing views and debates on the social and environmental impact of big dams, mining projects, mechanised fish trawlers, etc. The chapter therefore interrogates connected concepts of place, belonging, agency and development, also highlighting the fact that nature is not an unlimited ‘resource’ to be exploited through the power of technology and industry.
15Another chapter on “Who will do this work?” is about scavenging and the sensitive question of caste. It sensitively discusses with children on what kinds of work are considered ‘lowly’ and why, and how discriminatory practices continue in schools. “The Junk Seller” is based on the true story of a young woman who, against all odds of living in a poor, highly patriarchal society, managed to set up her own enterprise in a city. She narrates her struggle, her early dislike of mathematics in school, and her acknowledgement of it being an integral part of her present work, which helped change her life and the situation of her family. Through the visual narrative with on-site photographs, the chapter deals with her loans, her buying, sorting and selling of junk, hiring of collectors, and the rigorous recycling of different materials. It therefore challenges several prevailing notions of gender and mathematics, the stigma of ‘dirty work’, and inspires young women with a sense of ‘social agency’ to develop their entrepreneur abilities to transform lives (Rampal, 2015). It also shows that people considered as poor and potentially ‘dirty’ play a crucial role in keeping a city clean and healthy; it questions the injunction to ‘sort one’s waste’ in the name of environmental action for children for whom it is part of their parents’ or community’s livelihood.
16The integrated EVS primary curriculum as defined by NCF 2005, and the textbooks that followed, both had an underlying assumption of teachers as partners. The textbook transactions required the teachers to share the vision offered by the textbooks. Teachers had to place children at the centre of learning, be respectful of the diversities of their lives, focus on inquiry along with children, breakdown disciplinary boundaries in these inquiries, and push for transformative education based on critical pedagogy. The social constructivist pedagogy within which the textbooks were located required epistemic shifts from the teachers and their own training. Textbooks and teacher education in India has been entrenched in behaviourism rather than constructivism, conformity rather than transformation, and knowledge authority rather than knowledge co-creation. The EVS textbooks, on the other hand, encouraged the teacher to look at the natural and social worlds outside disciplinary boundaries of science and social science, and the textbook as only one of the sources of learning. The textbooks challenged and surprised the teachers, as science and social science met each other and questions of social justice, equity, knowledge, social practices and natural phenomena collided in the given narratives. While ESD today emphasises integration and inter linkages, teachers for long have been trained in isolating concepts, defining and making abstractions and distinctions. They had to unlearn and begin to re-examine the processes and de-emphasise the one-size-fits-all outcome. A paradigmatic shift was expected from teachers, implying that professional teacher education was essential. Two main challenges appeared to emerge, discussed in the context of student teachers in the B.El.Ed programme of Delhi University.
17The first one was that many schoolteachers resisted teaching through the textbook narratives, thinking it was a language matter, and feeling ‘there wasn’t enough content’, believing that abstract terms and terminologies were important for science. Narratives as a pedagogic device has been an effective means for introducing children to view with empathy other children their age leading significantly different lives from those they may have seen in their immediate surroundings. However, drawing out concepts from narratives was unfamiliar for the student-teachers (Susmita Ram, personal communication). It required to transcend their role as a ‘transmitter’ of disciplinary knowledge and assume the pedagogic role of stimulating and scaffolding around key questions that lead to conceptual knowledge. The special format and preamble of the syllabus provide some help, as each theme begins with key questions, framed in an accessible language that can tease and scaffold the thinking of children that age (NCERT, 2006).
18Another difficulty was that the teacher was also expected to facilitate perspective building among primary school students on empathetically examining disadvantage, challenging themselves to assess power relationships. This meant to be able to take a critical perspective on socio-environmental issues to enable a child to look critically at the world, find evidence and develop empathy for fellow humans and for non-humans. Teachers in public schools often come from a different background from the pupils, which means they rarely have a perspective on multiplicity of childhoods, intersections of caste and class. They therefore had to get past their own learning, of disciplinary boundaries, think empathetically through diverse and different perspectives, including those that were not urban and middle class, from communities extremely disadvantaged.
19While working on the chapter on food for example, a student teacher faced a situation where two children had not eaten anything because their parents were workers who left early to labour. In the class discussion on food choices, suddenly facing food availability as a crisis was both surprising and disturbing for a young pre-service teacher. However, the food chapters of the textbook had created space for conducting such discussions, in an atmosphere of sharing in class, in this case with narratives and experiential questions around hunger. This was not easy for pre-service teachers but the questions, once planted, did lead to attention on aspects that would otherwise have been dismissed, glossed over and silenced in the class. Teachers who were prepared to challenge their own prejudices and biases were also able to expose children to respectfully handle diversities and differences from surroundings immediate and distant. They could also avoid the risk of falling back on rigid science and social science distinctions, talking about food only in its elemental forms (proteins, carbohydrates…) or from a narrowly middle-class perspective (Rampal and Mandar, 2013).
20National bodies which steered the NCF, developed the syllabus and produced the national textbook, also set up a framework for pre-service teacher education, and organised in-service education of teachers. This involved getting teachers to first unlearn and critically reflect on their curricular pedagogic transactions - a difficult exercise considering the short duration of in-service programmes and long years of previous practice. In pre-service teacher education, however, the possibility to address this paradigm shift more in depth was available, as was done in the B.El.Ed. in Delhi, and some other states.
21The paradigmatic shift introduced by NCF 2005 is endangered by current national and international regimes that espouse increasingly neoliberal policies of privatisation. Even at primary level, there is an increasing emphasis on learning outcomes, which has led to decontextualised teaching and learning for set ‘outcomes’ in standardised examinations, leading to a categorisation (even segregation) of students based on marks, that has proved contrary to inclusive and collaborative learning. More recently, India which had long resisted being pushed into international testing, has declared that it will participate in the PISA tests, conducted by OECD (Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development), which shapes education policies and curricula from the Global North vantage position. Meanwhile, there is growing economic distress among farmers, artisans, fish workers, miners or indigenous forest dwellers; most have been protesting against new laws enacted that tend to favour corporate interests, while having a deleterious impact on their increasingly precarious conditions of labour and available resources. This reflects in the UN Sustainable Development Goals Report 2023 where India at the 112th position among 166 countries, faces major challenges in indicators on gender equality, nutrition, sustainable cities and communities, life on land, clean water and sanitation, and importantly, in peace, justice and strong institutions (Sachs et al., 2024).
22Despite this, the present dispensation is majorly restructuring the social sciences curricula, while it has already deleted crucial chapters from the secondary school textbooks on democracy and diversity, popular struggles and social movements, environmental degradation, patterns of social inequality, etc. Further, in a most disconcerting move, the latest NCF 2023 has pushed out EVS from being one of three main learning areas at primary school. It coins an inconsequential name – ‘World Around Us’ (WAU) –, gives unsubstantiated reasons for removing the crucial subject, and indicates that this area will not get the importance accorded to ‘Foundational Literacy and Numeracy’ (itself a diluted version of primary Language and Mathematics). Another issue of concern in NCF 2023 is the early push towards vocational education and skills. The policy to have fifty percent students in vocational education, along with the closure of several hundred thousand schools in tribal and poorer regions, gives a clear indication that the disadvantaged will be deprived of their right to equitable education. Moreover, the naming of activities, such as in the kitchen garden, clay modelling, or conducting a dialogue with shopkeepers, as those for building ‘pre-vocational capacities’ is extremely problematic. How can knowledge and processes essential to the learning of science, social science or EVS be selectively denoted as ‘pre-vocational’? Why bring in notions of ‘vocational’ capacities at this early age? Learning from artisans, farmers or shopkeepers is important for all children. The Gandhian system of Nayee Taleem held productive work to democratise education by integrating experiential and academic knowledge to erase the stigma of vocation tied to caste, not to direct disadvantaged children to a vocation, depriving them of an emancipatory education.
23NCF 2023 seems to abandon EVS and the ESD perspective it grounded at the primary level. However, the work done in EVS (NCF 2005) remains of great relevance in an international context, and allows a critical alternative perspective on the conceptions of ESD prevailing in the Global North, and of environmental education as understood in many parts of the world. The focus here is on social justice, fostering a critical understanding of power relations and structural inequalities but also a deep empathy for the diversity of lives – human, and also non-human. This conceptualisation of ESD is crucial to interrogate current models of development that disenfranchise a large majority and destroy the environment as well as the relationship of humans with nature. It also facilitates and nurtures transformative action for equitable and participatory development. Education thus becomes a dialogical process that generates values and agency as much as knowledge, through individuals that can harness a collective (Sharma, 2018).
24This implies that education should earnestly promote holistic thinking based on interdisciplinarity, should be equitable in itself, with a strong focus on epistemic justice and collaborative pedagogy, that is culturally embedded and also internationalist and universal in its concerns. In other words, ESD is about reconnecting knowledge, and also children, with people and ecologies. It signifies the importance of citizenship which develops the individual’s ability to build and mobilise his or her network of relationships (Sharma, 2018). A Gandhian perspective questions the individualistic focus of some ESD-related discourses of the Global North, to embrace a relational connect between learners and their natural and social environments. This also implies questioning the idea of competence, often understood at an individual level, to shift towards an understanding of competence as an enabling context, in the sense of Amartya Sen’s capabilities (Vare et al., 2022). It finally implies questioning the various divisions present in the narratives of so-called modern societies, as many Global North philosophers are currently doing, and taking better account of ontologies of a ‘pluriverse’ derived from indigenous cultures.
25This challenges the vision of a teacher’s role and issues of professional development, of creating democratic classrooms, of incorporating curricular progression, while invoking the holistic nature of ESD and not limiting it to changes at an individual level, but on social and ecological justice through systemic transformation.