What if a child’s first lesson about gender did not come from a lecture, but from a picture in a school textbook?
A father preparing food in the kitchen. A mother working alongside him. Girls playing drums or violins. Men and women standing together in a queue for water. A man weaving a flower garland while a woman works beside him.
These may appear to be ordinary illustrations. But they can quietly influence how children understand what men and women are “supposed” to do.
Andhra Pradesh is now trying to use school education to challenge exactly these assumptions.
When textbooks become social mirrors
Children do not learn only from written sentences.
They also learn from the images surrounding those sentences.
If every illustration shows women cooking, cleaning and caring for children while men work outside the home, a child can gradually begin to associate particular responsibilities with particular genders.
The opposite can also be true.
If textbooks regularly show men participating in household work and women participating in music, agriculture, public-facing jobs and other activities, children are exposed to a broader idea of what people can do.
This is the reasoning behind changes to Andhra Pradesh’s Class 1 and Class 2 textbooks.
According to the state’s HRD Minister Nara Lokesh, earlier textbook depictions showed household chores being performed entirely by women. The revised approach aims for an approximately 50:50 representation of household work between men and women.
The objective, as described by the state, is to avoid introducing gender stereotypes from the earliest years of schooling.
A girl with a drum is more than an illustration
Consider something as simple as a girl playing a drum.
There is nothing inherently unusual about it. Yet social expectations can sometimes make certain activities appear more “masculine” or “feminine” than they actually are.
Music, sport, science, engineering, cooking, caregiving and household responsibilities do not inherently belong to one gender.
A textbook cannot completely change social attitudes by itself, but it can avoid reinforcing assumptions that children may encounter elsewhere.
That is where the Andhra Pradesh experiment becomes interesting.
The revised books reportedly include girls participating in musical performances, men and women working together in agriculture, women in occupations such as vegetable selling, and men participating in household activities.
The message is not that traditional roles are wrong.
It is that traditional roles should not automatically become compulsory roles.
Why start with young children?
By the time a person becomes an adult, many ideas about society have already been formed.
Children observe their parents, relatives, teachers, television, social media and communities. They absorb patterns long before they can formally explain them.
This makes early education particularly important.
A classroom can become a place where children encounter possibilities rather than limitations.
A boy can see that cooking is normal.
A girl can see that playing an instrument is normal.
A child can see both parents sharing household responsibilities.
Another child can see women and men working together in a field.
None of these images needs a long explanation.
Sometimes normalisation itself becomes a form of education.
Beyond gender: changing the classroom itself
The textbook changes are part of a wider education reform agenda in Andhra Pradesh.
The state has also introduced “No Bag Day” activities on Saturdays, with an emphasis on practical and value-based learning. Activities mentioned by the state include managing family and agricultural budgets, field exposure and introductory learning about artificial intelligence.
This represents a broader question about what education should accomplish.
Should school primarily teach children how to reproduce information?
Or should it also help them understand how society works?
Budgeting, technology, social values, gender sensitivity and practical activities belong to the second category.
Bringing AI into the classroom
Interestingly, gender-sensitive textbooks are not the only unusual part of the proposed changes.
Students are also being introduced to both the benefits and risks of artificial intelligence.
The state has discussed technology-enabled classrooms in which a lesson could be followed by a short video summary and a few questions. Students would respond using classroom devices, while the resulting information could feed into a Learning Management System.
The stated objective is to move students from being passive learners towards more active participation.
The proposed system could also identify areas where an individual student needs additional learning material and provide targeted homework or content through the LEAP platform.
This creates an interesting combination:
social reform through curriculum + personalised learning through technology.
Education is also about what society considers normal
There is a deeper sociological point here.
Institutions do not merely transmit knowledge. They also transmit norms.
A school teaches mathematics and language, but it can simultaneously communicate ideas about discipline, cooperation, responsibility, work and social roles.
This is why curriculum design can have consequences beyond examination halls.
If a textbook repeatedly represents certain occupations or responsibilities as belonging exclusively to one gender, it can unintentionally reinforce social expectations.
If it presents a wider range of possibilities, it can at least create space for children to imagine different futures.
This does not mean that a textbook alone can eliminate discrimination.
Family attitudes, economic conditions, media representation, workplace structures and social traditions continue to influence children.
But education can become one part of a much larger cultural process.
From representation to participation
There is also an important distinction between showing equality and creating equality.
A textbook may show a woman working as an engineer.
That is representation.
But if a girl later faces barriers when she actually wants to enter engineering, representation alone is insufficient.
Similarly, showing fathers cooking in textbooks is useful, but genuine equality in household responsibilities ultimately depends on what families actually do.
Therefore, the real test of such educational reforms will not simply be whether textbooks contain balanced illustrations.
It will be whether children eventually carry those ideas into everyday life.
Andhra Pradesh’s experiment raises a larger question
The interesting part of this initiative is not simply that Andhra Pradesh has changed some textbook pictures.
It raises a much larger question:
Can education influence social behaviour by changing what children see as normal?
There is no single answer.
Schools are only one part of socialisation. But they are an unusually important one because they reach children at a formative stage and can introduce ideas systematically.
India already has national programmes that seek to address gender discrimination and promote the education and empowerment of girls. The Ministry of Women and Child Development describes initiatives such as Beti Bachao Beti Padhao as aiming not only at immediate outcomes but also at changes in attitudes and behaviour towards girls and women.
Andhra Pradesh’s textbook approach operates at a much smaller, everyday level.
Instead of beginning with a slogan, it begins with an illustration.
A father cooking.
A girl playing music.
A woman working.
A man helping at home.
Two people sharing responsibilities.
The lesson may be simple
Perhaps the most important lesson is that equality does not necessarily have to be introduced to children as a complicated theory.
Sometimes it can simply be presented as ordinary life.
A boy does not need to be told that cooking is “for everyone” if he repeatedly sees his father cooking.
A girl does not need a special speech about what she can achieve if her textbook naturally shows women performing different kinds of work.
The purpose is not to tell children what they must become.
It is to avoid telling them, indirectly, what they cannot become because of their gender.
That distinction matters.
Education should open doors, not quietly decide which doors belong to whom.
And perhaps the most powerful textbook is ultimately not the one that tells children how society should look, but the one that gives them enough possibilities to imagine how society could look.
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