Yvette Rosser

The main purpose of this paper is to survey the origins of educational policies during the colonial period. The emphasis on elite English education, and its displacement from traditional instructional models, resulted in a break with the everyday experiences of the "illiterate masses," and thus reified the gap between the classes. The educated elites' perception of "the uneducated population as an object of moral improvement"  is mirrored in the Utilitarian, Evangelical, Victorian educational models. Though British rule was cast off with relish, the educational models inherited from the colonizers continue to create paradoxical curricular paradigms in post-independence India.

I also briefly trace their appropriation and application by the nationalist movement and the persistence of these pedagogical paradigms in post-independence India. This discussion is situated within a critique of textbook-centered instruction. At the end of this paper I discuss a controversy that arose in the representation of history and the production of textbooks during the Janata government in the late seventies. The central question driving the writing of this paper asks, "Can a modern/traditional multi-ethnic political nation-state such as India, build a democratic entity through the schools, using textbooks as resources?" This paper thus discusses the influences of colonialism and nationalism on curriculum and textbook design in India, and offer a conclusion that raises more questions than answers.