The social and political life textbooks: A. Include definitions and…

The NCERT 'Social and Political Life' (SPL) textbook series, developed under the National Curriculum Framework (NCF) 2005, follows a specific pedagogical design principle: middle-school social science teaching should move learners beyond abstract definitions of institutions toward an understanding of how institutions and social relations actually function in practice, using diverse concrete situations from different regions and social groups — rather than presenting institutions and processes as though they operate exactly as an idealized document such as the Constitution envisions them.

Applying this design principle to each statement: socio-political concepts are still introduced through definitions and descriptions as a starting point for discussion, so this component holds; and the textbooks consistently ground these concepts in diverse, concrete case studies of people and regions across India rather than staying abstract, so this component also holds. However, a core aim of this textbook series was explicitly to move away from depicting institutions and processes as functioning exactly as envisioned in the Constitution — real gaps, contestations, and inequalities in how institutions actually work are foregrounded instead, so this component does not hold.

• The pairing “A and B” combines a valid component with the institutional-idealization claim, which is not the approach these textbooks take.

• The pairing “B and C” likewise combines a valid component with the same institutional-idealization claim.

• The pairing “A, B and C” adds the same institutional-idealization claim to both valid components.

Only the pairing of definitions-and-descriptions with diverse concrete examples reflects how the Social and Political Life series was actually designed, per NCERT’s own position paper on Social Science teaching, and this is confirmed by the CBSE CTET (January 2021, Paper 2) official answer key for this item.