Textbooks revised to erase gender stereotypes: Nara Lokesh

New Delhi; School textbooks in Andhra Pradesh have been revised to remove gender stereotypes and instil respect for women from an early age, according to the state HRD minister Nara Lokesh.

The minister made the comments on Thursday during a fireside chat organised by the Public Affairs Forum of India (PAFI) in Delhi and outlined the state’s ongoing reforms in school and higher education, with a strong focus on value-based education, gender sensitivity, technology-enabled learning, curriculum reform and industry-linked skilling.

He said Andhra Pradesh is examining which courses, majors, and minors are offered, whether they remain relevant, and how closely curricula align with market requirements. “Textbooks for Classes 1 and 2 earlier depicted household chores as being performed entirely by women. The state has changed this approach so that 50 per cent of the household chores shown are performed by men and 50 per cent by women, aiming to avoid gender stereotyping from the first grade itself,” he said.

Lokesh said that Saturday is observed as a ‘No Bag Day’ in schools, providing an opportunity for value-based and practical learning. “Activities include lessons on managing family budgets and agricultural budgets, field exposure visits and an introduction to Artificial Intelligence. Students are being introduced to both the positive and negative sides of AI so they can understand the technology and use it effectively in their chosen fields,” he noted.

On curriculum reform, Lokesh said the state has already undertaken two rounds of curriculum improvement. He stressed that curriculum transformation cannot happen overnight and must instead be reformed incrementally and systematically, with grade-wise improvements and continuous additions. He also outlined his long-term goal of “gamifying” classrooms through technology. Under the proposed approach, after every 45-minute class, students would watch a 60- or 90-second video summarising the lesson, followed by four to five questions.

Using clicker technology, students would participate in answering questions, turning the classroom into a more interactive learning environment. “The objective is to shift students from being passive learners to active learners. The learning data would feed into the state’s Learning Management System (LMS), enabling the system to identify individual learning gaps and provide prescriptive homework and targeted learning content,” he said. Lokesh cited the example of a student who may be strong in mathematics but weak in a particular concept such as probability. “The system would identify the specific gap and provide additional homework and learning material through the LEAP app, which is accessible to parents and teachers as well. This would allow students to clearly understand the areas where they need improvement,” he said.

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