How to talk to kids about the Constitution
Subscribe to enjoy similar stories. For the winter holiday homework, my daughter’s class was asked to study the Preamble and find out more about fundamental rights, duties and the drafting of the Constitution. They did not just have to learn about the text but also respond to the artwork on the borders as well.
This culminated in an activity to create their own preamble as a class, complete with embellishments. The activity sounds simple enough, doesn’t it? But nothing could be further from that. As an adult, you are aware of what an amendment means, or the significance that the words “sovereign", “democratic", “secular" and “republic" hold for us.
But how do you make them accessible to children? Even in the era of AI-generated summaries, ready explainers and YouTube videos, some concepts are hard to simplify. How do you break a document so vast and complex down in a way that relates to their everyday lives? Books, as always, rise to the occasion, and help you hold on to the myth of the parent as a one-stop-authority on all subjects for just a little longer. In this case, Subhadra Sen Gupta’s The Constitution of India for Children, with illustrations by Tapas Guha, became my greatest ally.
The book starts with some interesting facts to draw the kids in—that the Indian Constitution is the longest such written document in the world with 448 articles in 22 parts, 12 schedules and 146,385 words in the English version. While making the subject of the Constitution engaging for children, the book doesn’t dumb down concepts such as caste and untouchability. Children are taken on a journey from the struggle for independence to the nation coming into its own as a republic.
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