School is not merely a site that produces future doctors, engineers, or professors. The making of future citizens also begins at schools. Young minds first develop their preliminary understanding of the state, society, and public institutions within the classroom. It is therefore not at all surprising that the inclusion of judicial corruption in the Class VIII textbook of the NCERT has sparked a nationwide debate.

The controversy has actually raised a fundamental question: what kind of understanding should a democratic state impart to children about its own institutions? If corruption exists within these institutions, how should it be represented in school textbooks? And, more importantly, is it necessary at all to make adolescent learners aware of such corruption? At first glance, one might argue that in a democracy no institution is above criticism, and therefore there is nothing inherently wrong in introducing discussions of judicial corruption in a middle-school textbook.

Indeed, the health of a democracy depends on whether citizens are able to question and critique public institutions. Democratic institutions are accountable to the people, and such accountability ensures their responsibility. If corruption exists within the judicial system, citizens unquestionably have the right to criticise it. The real question, however, is whether presenting judicial corruption to school students through textbooks is necessary. The straightforward answer, arguably, is no.

There is little reason to assume that schools are politically neutral or innocent spaces. The French philosopher Louis Althusser famously described schools as ‘Ideological State Apparatuses.’ Such institutions function not through coercion but through consent, shaping children’s understanding of social values, norms, and morality. Unlike the police or the military, schools do not exercise overt repression; their ideological work therefore remains less........

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