12/1/2023 0 Comments Boston legal jibber jabber![]() Was Godse a pathological killer or a maniac on the move, students might wonder. We know who killed him, Nathuram Godse, but we do not know for certain why he did it. Still, it is sad that the NCERT does not want to let future generations know why Mahatma Gandhi was killed. The assumption that schoolchildren rely on textbooks and not Wikipedia is, of course, hallucinatory. History in these textbooks will remain a series of meaningless statements. These books do not want children to connect the dots. It is this very aspect of pedagogy that ‘rationalised’ NCERT textbooks sideline. It is precisely the development of critical thinking, of the need to ask ‘why’, of a never-ending search for coherence, and of recognition that we want to know more, that makes for intelligent and knowledgeable human beings. It is this spirit that develops their cognitive faculties, that encourages their quest for the holy grail - for the links that connect a series of dots in history. The job of education is to cultivate a spirit of enquiry into what these links may be in the mind of a student. Otherwise, we are left with a series of propositions without anything to hold them together, meaningless ‘jibber-jabber’ as a judge says in TV series Boston Legal. What is important are the links between propositions in any field of academic endeavour. ![]() Otherwise, we might have concluded that the queen died because she mourned the death of a friend, a lover or a pet dog. There is no link between the first two sentences unless we find out that it was grief at the king’s death that caused her own death. The queen died and no one knew why, till it was discovered that she died of grief at the death of the king, is a plot with mystery in it. ‘The king died and then the queen died of grief’ is a plot. IN Aspects of the Novel, EM Forster tells us that the statement ‘the king died and then the queen died’ is a story.
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