Killing the Critical: A Critical Discourse Analysis of Moral Values in Government-sponsored Textbooks of Nepal

Abstract

Textbooks have always been a major means of standardizing the curriculum and the activities of the students. The standardization happens through teaching the values. However, the values are transformed as discourse — the means through which the reality is known or made to be known. Informed by the insights basically founded in Critical Discourse Analysis, this paper tries to explore the values– beliefs about certain aspect such as family, society and nation, in school-level textbooks, especially of Nepali and Social Studies, of government schools of Nepal, and attempts to argue that the textbooks prescribed by the current curriculum are cultural production at large therefore textual. Specifically, it argues how the inculcation of critical attitude in the school children has been undermined giving rise to the pedagogy that largely emphasizes on mere knowing some values that mar the development of critical attitude in the students. As a qualitative inquiry, the article critically draws upon the ideological interpretation of the moral values, and concludes the total patterning of the content of the textbooks clearly keeps the essentialities of modern education such as critical engagement, linguistic and cognitive skills, the questioning attitude and critical thinking on the part of the students at bay.