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varying proportions of the two components. It had stated that vocationalisation of school education must be seen
in the context of equity and social justice, contrary to the present system where the vocational stream is clearly viewed as the one
meant for the less able and the less fortunate Section 2.2.6.
2.2 Contested Conceptions of Uniformity and Flexibility
The challenge of translating the vision of equality into a curricular framework has remained unanswered, and
as reflected in the series of Curriculum Framework documents NCERT 1975, 1988, 2000 that followed,
these wishful statements were not always matched with consonant conceptions of what formed a democratic
and ‘equalising’ curriculum. The first doubts and tensions appeared in the 1975 document on the
Curriculum for the Ten-year School, where it was stated that “For a vast country like ours with its diversity of
languages, social customs, manners, mores and uneven economic development, the needs and demands of
individuals and society will have differential pulls on the school curriculum, varying from one region to the
other. For the sake of uniformity of standards and of national identity, therefore it is necessary to develop a
common curriculum within a broad framework of acceptable principles and values” Section 2.1.
This central concern for what was then ambiguously called ‘uniformity of standards and
national identity’ served as a justification for the centralising tendency in curriculum construction. While
the 1975 Curricular Framework confessed that the task of effecting ‘internal transformation’ of education to
address the life, needs, and aspirations of the nation was becoming increasingly difficult under the mounting
pressure of growing numbers of children, and owing to ‘rigid postures and orthodox attitudes’, it could not
radically transcend these limitations. Some broad statements of objectives were made, which provided
no indication of how a curriculum was to be designed to address the vision of education for children from
diverse cultural and social backgrounds, while the document moved directly to the teaching and content
of subject areas. That children learn through active engagement with
their experiences, and that their learning and development is shaped by their cultural capital,
including how their societies have looked at the social and physical world around them, was never
acknowledged. Also, the concern articulated by policy documents that the existing format of schooling,
including the selection of the syllabus, the teaching approaches, and the examinations, was alienating most
children and consistently reinforcing inequality was never addressed. The 1975 document continued to
speak of the diverse requirements of children only in terms of “the special needs of the talented, the
backward, and those coming from non-for mal channels”. In fact, its section on ‘The Core Curriculum
and Beyond’ delineates how schools would need to go beyond the core curriculum to provide ‘additional
inputs’ for those who may offer to study ‘advanced units’; similarly, “students coming from the less
fortunate schools or from non-formal education may also need remedial units or bridging units which schools
would have to provide” section 2.15.
2.3 Limited Notions of the ‘Curriculum’ and ‘Beyond the Core Curriculum’
