“छह साल की छोकड़ी …”
You must have seen this poem with a kid selling mangoes on the right. She is a kid. The poem says she is six. Well, one might argue that there is nothing wrong with the poem and interpretation might have all the devils inside. However, most of us will agree that the poem is not something that anyone would choose for his or her kids. There are many other poems by many other poets that could be taught to children of classes one, two, three and four. Not this one… at least!
There are many poems floating on social media. There are many substandard stories from the NCERT books and many controversial extracts as well. Social Media has come up heavily on the NCERT for such poor, lopsided and unscrupulous choices made while preparing the content for kids and youths. Some of the charges are of mediocre or lowly content, lousy choices and religious bias or brainwashing.
While we have the right to agree or disagree with the judgements being thrown by people, it is too difficult to not notice what is going on. There have been numerous instances that tell us how lackadaisical has been the approach of NCERT in preparing the syllabus that does not come up with too much to learn and rather offers too much of ambiguous approach in choosing the content by some ‘unknown’ or not known authors.
NCERT has been in the news many times and not for good reasons. The organisation has to decide what should be the ideal way forward because it has most of the students in the country who read the content they prepare. If content does not meet even with the basic standard then it is certainly a problem that needs to dealt with… and immediately! The present government has introduced the new education policy the previous year and it is only to presume right now on what might be the structure of content and syllabus. However, one can certainly hope that whatever comes out of this churning should be progressive, with a certain quality and not substandard brainwashing material taking the fragile mind of students backwards instead of taking them forward with something that might allow them to earn their living and become responsible social participants.
Though NCERT tried to defend the useless poem with arguments like dialects are used to make the students aware of local ideas and culture. This argument does not hold even for a moment. It can be seen that the poem is only about ill practices and rather than condemning, the poet seems to have glorified. Other than that, the dual-meaning obscenity in the poem can also be witnessed rather apparently. And therefore, it is to be expected that NCERT does not remain shameless and thankless when people catch their slippery approach.
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