Let's not overload the Indian school curriculum with causes that are dear to us—it’s heavy enough

The second conversation was with a person who has spent four decades working on road safety. He wanted traffic safety embedded in school activity—first as teacher training, then as curriculum. He was not wrong either.

The third was with someone who has worked on water conservation. She wanted schools to take up the challenge of water—its scarcity, pollution, wastage and responsible use.

All the three conversations had a common refrain. When I pointed out that each of these topics already exists in the curriculum, the response was the same: yes, we know, but it doesn’t get adequate attention and teachers don’t know how to handle it well. I would not dispute their assessment.

In the last six months, I have had nearly identical conversations about plastic waste, energy conservation, menstrual health, mental health, social media and healthy eating. Each topic is urgent. Each was with a champion who knows it deeply and cares passionately. Each champion is right that schools currently do not do justice to their concern. And each of them—quite reasonably—wants schools to do more.

The fact that we work with a large number of schools and state school systems makes us one natural port of call for people who want to influence schools and their curriculum. Their causes cannot be dismissed. But standing at the intersection as we do, we see something that each such individual champion usually does not: the ever growing cumulative weight of all these expectations is falling on the same institution.

Pause for a moment and imagine what we are asking for. A school—with a fixed number of hours in the day, a curriculum already dense with content and teachers who are themselves stretched—is expected to develop in children a comprehensive understanding of knowledge across disciplines.

At the same time, a school is also expected to develop values and ethical sensibilities, and build capacities like critical thinking and empathy, and then go on to address child safety, road safety, water conservation, environmental awareness, mental health, digital literacy, nutrition and a dozen other things; each of these has its own dedicated pedagogy, each requiring teacher training, each deserving real time and attention. It is not going to work. It cannot work. And we should say so honestly.

There are two things that must change. The first is that we must stop assigning everything that matters in society to the school system alone. Schools are important—arguably the most organized and equitable institutions we have for reaching children—but they are not the only place where children learn. Families, communities, media, public libraries, cultural institutions, peer groups—all of these shape children in profound ways.

Ignoring the responsibility of these other institutions and habitually burdening schools is not just unfair to them, it is also ineffective. A child’s understanding of water or traffic safety will be thin and brittle if it exists only as a lesson in class and is contradicted by everything she sees at home and in her neighbourhood.

The second and more fundamental point is this: if schools teach the core curriculum well—genuinely well—they create a foundation on which everything else can be built. A child who has learnt to think clearly, question, reason, understand evidence, deal with complexity and act with regard for others is prepared to understand and internalize matters of water, safety, health or anything else.

These capacities are not separate from the specific content that each advocate wants taught. They are what makes specific content actually stick and mean something.

The temptation is always to respond to each new urgent concern by adding a little more to the curriculum, training teachers more and finding a little more time. But this approach is well past its point of effectiveness by now. The curriculum is not a vessel with unlimited capacity.

There is an old and wise saying in education: in schooling, less is more. It has never been more relevant than it is today. The most important thing we can do for children—and for all the causes we care about—is to protect the space for schools to do fewer things but do them with depth, care and genuine quality.

That is how you build a good society. Not by adding more weight to an already burdened institution, but by helping it stand firm under the weight it already carries.

The author is CEO of Azim Premji Foundation.