Father working alongside the mother in the kitchen, girls on drums and violins during musical performances, and men and women both standing in line to collect water from a common public tap: These are some of the images that can be seen in the new textbooks for classes 1 and 2 in Andhra Pradesh as it attempts to eliminate gender stereotypes from a young age.In the new books, the children will also be introduced to both “good” and “bad” sides of Artificial Intelligence.“While past textbooks depicted household chores as being performed entirely by women, the new textbooks, introduced recently, changed this approach so that 50% of the household chores shown are performed by men and 50% by women,” said an official.“The aim is to avoid gender stereotyping from the first grade itself,’’ said Andhra Pradesh IT and HRD minister N Lokesh Naidu.During a chat organised by the Public Affairs Forum of India (PAFI) in Delhi on Thursday, Lokesh said that the state’s ongoing reforms in school and higher education have a strong focus on value-based education, gender sensitivity, technology-enabled learning, curriculum reform and industry-linked skilling. The Education Department has undertaken two rounds of curriculum improvement for the purpose.Other examples of gender-neutral roles in the textbook are a woman selling vegetables, a man weaving a flower garland alongside a woman at a shop, and a man and a woman working in tandem in an agricultural field.Listing other changes in the school system, Lokesh said primary schools are now implementing “No Bag Day” on Saturdays, which is reserved for value-based and practical learning. The activities include lessons on managing family budgets and agricultural budgets, field exposure visits and an introduction to AI.Story continues below this adLokesh said students are being introduced to both the positive and negative sides of AI so they can understand the technology and use it effectively in their chosen fields. The Education Department has undertaken two rounds of curriculum improvement for the purpose.The state government is working on a project of “gamifying” classrooms through technology.Under the proposed approach, after every 45-minute class, students would watch a 60- or 90-second video summarising the lesson, followed by four to five questions. Using clicker technology, students would actively participate in answering the questions, turning the classroom into a more interactive learning environment, he said. The Education Department has undertaken two rounds of curriculum improvement for the purpose.‘From passive to active learners’Story continues below this adThe objective, Lokesh said, is to shift students from being passive learners to active learners.“The data would feed into the state’s Learning Management System (LMS), enabling the system to identify individual learning gaps and provide prescriptive homework and targeted learning content,” he said.“If a student is strong in mathematics but weak in another subject, the system would identify the specific gap and provide additional homework and learning material through the LEAP app, which is accessible to parents and teachers as well. This would allow students to clearly understand the areas where they need improvement,” he added.The minister said the state government was also working to improve the teacher-taught ratio. “From just 3% schools having one teacher per class in 2024, the number has now increased to 33%,” he said.Story continues below this ad“The state recently completed a major teacher recruitment drive under which 16,000 teachers were recruited to achieve the objective of one teacher per class,” Lokesh told The Indian Express on Friday. He said teacher recruitment is being undertaken every year.At the Delhi event, Lokesh said that besides schools, the state is reviewing university curricula through discussions with academicians. “The state is examining what courses, majors and minors, are being offered, whether they remain relevant, and how closely curricula are aligned with market requirements,” he added.