Nature Society Series (Karnatak Map)

Our system of education has many drawbacks, and resources that enable it to efficiently sustain its many rigidities. A map of the kind you now have in your hands can soften quite a few of these rigidities.

What is a map? This question holds the future of school geography, and to a considerable extent, the future of education. The old idea of a map focuses on its utility, to locate places and determine direction. Political history has widened this core utility to include in it a powerful socialising device, to create territorial nation states in the young mind. Children are exposed to maps long before they understand how the maps are made and how they work. Education submits to the mysterious power of the boundaries that maps display. Borders make the earth less important than the custodians of the borders in each society and nation. Nature's crisis and the dire state of tension between human relations with nature and human relations with other humans become impervious to education, including the best kind of education.

This is why we must find ways to think afresh about maps. They must connect with social institutions because human beings, from their childhood onwards, are located in these institutions. Physical location in a space comes later, and in today's world, it is no longer as important as it was in the past. Far more significant is the social location, where institutions as basic as the family intersect with national and global institutions that govern economic, political and cultural life. Maps that visualise and discuss this intersection marks a new beginning. Its potential as a pedagogic device will unfold and grow with use in a million classrooms, in the hands of countless teachers and children.

I feel privileged and thrilled to present the booklets of this series. I have no doubt that it will open new vistas of education, enabling it to engage with the crisis of ecology the world and India are facing. It will also open new avenues for making sense of peace as a goal of education and pursuing it.

Krishna Kumar