Undoubtedly, school years were just the best years of our lives. We learned, made friends & memories, got scolded, moved on, fell in love, and experienced our first heartbreak. We grew, and then came the horror of board examination we cleared only to realize that marks don’t really matter in the real world.
Schools, Colleges, and Educational Institutions that are supposed to develop a human being have also been found to teach useless and sometimes pretty objectionable stuff to students.
Here is a list of those WTF things found in Indian textbooks that are ideally meant for student education.
1. 36-24-26 is the best shape for women.
We talk about insecurities that strike women when they hit puberty. We see young teenage boys objectifying women from a very young age. Guess where all that comes from? Don’t choke as you read this.
This Class 12 Physical Education textbook has an ideal body size to recommend for its female readers because that’s how they can be considered for Ms. World or Ms. Universe
2. This ‘progressive’ book for doctors details the ‘ideal female for sexual acts.’
Because women are nothing more than baby-making factories. This Ayurveda book for final year students in Bachelor’s Degree has a whole section explaining women as sexual items. The book also goes on to objectify women to detail an ideal female for a healthy progeny. This section also came in their exam by the way.
Ladies, if you don’t look beautiful and don’t make those delicate movements stereotypically associated with femininity, and if you do not have physical stature, who are you, and why are you?
3. ‘Blasphemous Boys Rape Our Young Girls’ is a scheme to remember the color code for Electronics students.
We all know how exhausting it was to remember the periodic table when our teachers aided us with crazy mnemonics to help us with the elements.
But this textbook for budding Electronic Engineers took mnemonics several notches worse when they tapped into rape as a scheme to remember the color code for resistors. The scheme stated: ‘Blasphemous Boys Rape Our Young Girls But Violet Gives Willingly.’
Can it get any worse?
4. Woman is the cause of unemployment in country.
Yes, you read that right. Do you know why? Since women started working after Independence, they are a great reason behind rampant unemployment in our country because working is a man’s domain and the cause of all economic problems in the world is a woman. Right?
This issue came to light in 2015 when a young teacher raised her concern about a topic in a Hindi Social Science textbook from the Chhattisgarh Board of Secondary Education. Reportedly, the book stated that the percentage of unemployment has increased because women have started working across sectors.
5. Dark skin is ugly & fair skin is beautiful.
This might be a classic reason why fairness creams are still so popular in India. From a very young age, kids are exposed to a superficial understanding of beauty where fair skin is considered beautiful and dark skin is considered ugly. If kids grow up to be colourist and racist jerks, can anyone blame them?
They won’t teach us taxes but this!
6. Housewives are donkey wives.
We live in a society that has predetermined gender roles for men and women and has deemed the former as superior beings. And women? Well! They’re donkeys who are supposed to toil all day and give up their food and water for the sake of family.
In 2006, the Times of India reported an offending chapter from a Class 9 Hindi textbook of Rajasthan Education Board that equated homemakers to donkeys and considered men as masters who own women.
A donkey is like a housewife. It has to toil all day and, like her, may even have to give up food and water. In fact, the donkey is a shade better, for while the housewife may sometimes complain and walk off to her parent’s home, you’ll never catch a donkey being disloyal to his master.
Yah! Teach this to young impressionable boys and they’ll grow up to be male chauvinist pigs.
7. Handicapped & Ugly girls are why families demand dowry.
Welcome to the transactional institution of marriage where marriage is a necessity big enough that parents are willing to wed their daughter to any random jerk who asks for dowry because he doesn’t know how to deal with his ugly self anymore. He projects his own hideousness upon a woman, and this stuff is so common that students learn it in schools.
A Class 12 Sociology textbook once entailed a paragraph on ‘ugliness of the girl.’
8. Hey kids! Here’s an interesting ‘educational’ experiment, KILL A CAT.
Out of all the experiments that could have been done to demonstrate that living things need air to breathe, this class 4 textbook basically asked students to kill a cat because ‘animal cruelty jaisa kuch nahi hota.’
Perhaps, this is the reason why there is no dearth of humans being cruel to animals.
9. Lesbianism is unnatural.
Yes, students in AIIMS were offered homophobia in the name of education. This excerpt from The Essentials of Forensic Medicine and Toxicology suggested that “Lesbianism may be the product of a faulty environment” where “outlets for a more normal sex drive do not exist.”
10. Ugly looking girls can be married off with handsome dowries so here are the advantages of dowry system.
This ‘beautiful’ textbook of Sociology for Nurses details some priceless benefits of the century-old dowry system. One of its ridiculous points essentially recommends giving dowry to indirectly reduce dowry in the future. What the author means is if you give dowry, parents will educate girls who will later get employment, and they won’t practise dowry in the future. I call it **METAVERSE OF STUPIDITY!**
To summarise, we’ve seen misogyny, patriarchy, sexism, homophobia, colourism, and animal cruelty featuring in our Indian Educational textbooks from as late as 2006 to as recent as 2022.
Still any doubt why people criticize our Education System?
Also Read: Books Banned in India