Skip to main content

New Education Policy

Source: Dawn


From the highlights available so far, the New Education Policy 2020 [NEP2020] seems to be well-meaning. There are certain changes that are very much needed. For example, it seeks to make school education more pragmatic and career-oriented by introducing vocational education from grade 6 with internship. It will certainly help a lot of students to find jobs much earlier than the present system does.

The objective of NEP2020 to foster “holistic development of learners by equipping them with 21st century skills, reduction in curricular content to enhance essential learning and critical thinking and greater focus on experiential learning” can also work wonders if properly implemented. 

The existing system lays undue stress on rote learning and mere reproduction of that memorised knowledge without any creative and critical thinking. This system does not take the students beyond the most fundamental objectives of education: acquisition of basic knowledge. In other words, it does not encourage critical thinking, questioning, creativity, analysis and synthesis. It creates citizens who will merely toe the lines drawn by various authorities: governments, powerful political parties, religions, and so on.

Will NEP2020 take students beyond that to new horizons? Will it really shape students who question intelligently, think creatively, and beat new tracks? Or is it going to be just another glittering façade with little beyond the superficial glitter? After all, this government is notorious for giving us such facades: the Statue of Unity, for example.

If you read into the document, you have reasons to be sceptical. “The vision of the policy is to instil among the learners a deep-rooted pride in being Indian, not only in thought, but also in spirit, intellect, and deeds, as well as to develop knowledge, skills, values, and dispositions that support responsible commitment to human rights, sustainable development and living, and global well-being, thereby reflecting a truly global citizen.” Isn’t there some self-contradiction there? You have to be Indian in thought, spirit, intellect, and deeds and global citizen in knowledge, skills, values, and dispositions!

Well, we need roots in our own soil before we can spread the branches into the neighbourhood skies. That’d be fine indeed if it were not a BJP government – particularly one led by a person like Mr Narendra Modi – that was presenting this policy.

The problem has seldom been with policies. It is not the principles of socialism that undermined socialist governments; it is the misuse of the system. The same is true with every system including capitalism (in spite of its individualism and competitive spirit) and religions. We human beings bring all our greed and selfishness and envy and all other possible vices into the system, however wonderful the system is. And the system collapses sooner than later.

When you have a leader whose track history is soaked in blood and vengeance with an equal measure of chicanery, you can’t expect a policy to be as sublime as it sounds through the loudspeaker. The leader makes most of the difference.

NEP2020 seeks to sideline English altogether subtly and not so subtly. Education is to be in mother tongue up to grade 5, then “preferably till grade 8 and beyond”, and also in “more higher education institutions.” Sanskrit will be an option made available to students “at all levels”.

At the same time, NEP2020 seeks to bring “top world ranked universities” to India. Well, we don’t suppose that top world universities are going to give Indians instruction in the latter’s mother tongues or in Sanskrit.

Given Mr Modi’s grandiose visions, it is probable that he imagines Sanskrit towering above all and becoming a global language in his lifetime itself and India becoming the global superpower dishing out Ayurvedic concoctions as panacea for all evils. Is there that undercurrent too in NEP2020? I am not sure. I have only got the highlights so far though that is a pretty long document which throws ample light into the spirit of the policy. I can almost imagine Mr Modi standing on the Himalayas and looking with pride at the Akhand Bharat stretching beyond the Alps. Some policies are indeed grandiose.

Comments

  1. I would like to be hopeful about NEP 2020. I think the bit about English being done and dusted away is largely misconstrued. I read an entire piece in the Mint on how it doesn't mean English is going away. But I understand your scepticism too keeping the present government's notorious image. Nonetheless, I'm only hoping that this will end the much hyped competitive and capitalistic system we have had, from the pov of students and work in favour of the fishes who would not be judged by their ability to climb trees. Rest, we can only wait and watch.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. It won't be easy to do away with English simply because it remains the only language that has managed to spread all over the world so far. Mr Modi's love for Sanskrit is not shared even by Indians except in emotional displays. I taught in a school in Delhi for a decade and a half and Sanskrit was an optional subject there up to grade 10. Most students who opted for it did so because it was too easy to score marks with very little effort (and less knowledge :) )That's what Indians are when it comes to learning what's not really useful for life.

      As I said in the post, the new policy sounds good. If only we make it work!

      Delete
    2. Totally. It's wait and watch. I don't know how many glitches have they catered for, because there are going to be many.

      Delete
  2. I'm highly skeptical about the implementation too, but atleast it's a start I guess. As for local languages being the medium of study, it is pretty impractical for central schools and the like too. Wonder how that'll work out.

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Adventures of Toto as a comic strip

  'The Adventures of Toto' is an amusing story by Ruskin Bond. It is prescribed as a lesson in CBSE's English course for class 9. Maggie asked her students to do a project on some of the lessons and Femi George's work is what I would like to present here. Femi converted the story into a beautiful comic strip. Her work will speak for itself and let me present it below.  Femi George Student of Carmel Public School, Vazhakulam, Kerala Similar post: The Little Girl

Don Bosco

Don Bosco (16 Aug 1815 - 31 Jan 1888) In Catholic parlance, which flows through my veins in spite of myself, today is the Feast of Don Bosco. My life was both made and unmade by Don Bosco institutions. Any great person can make or break people because of his followers. Religious institutions are the best examples. I’m presenting below an extract from my forthcoming book titled Autumn Shadows to celebrate the Feast of Don Bosco in my own way which is obviously very different from how it is celebrated in his institutions today. Do I feel nostalgic about the Feast? Not at all. I feel relieved. That’s why this celebration. The extract follows. Don Bosco, as Saint John Bosco was popularly known, had a remarkably good system for the education of youth.   He called it ‘preventive system’.   The educators should be ever vigilant so that wrong actions are prevented before they can be committed.   Reason, religion and loving kindness are the three pillars of that syste...

Coffee can be bitter

The dawns of my childhood were redolent of filtered black coffee. We were woken up before the birds started singing in the lush green village landscape outside home. The sun would split the darkness of the eastern sky with its splinter of white radiance much after we children had our filtered coffee with a small lump of jaggery. Take a bite of the jaggery and then a sip of the coffee. Coffee was a ritual in our home back then. Perhaps our parents believed it would jolt our neurons awake and help us absorb our lessons before we set out on the 4-kilometre walk to school after all the morning rituals at home. After high school, when I left home for further studies at a distant place, the ritual of the morning coffee stopped. It resumed a whole decade later when I completed my graduation and took up a teaching job in Shillong. But I had lost my taste for filtered coffee by then; tea took its place. Plain tea without milk – what is known as red tea in most parts of India. Coffee ret...

The Real Enemies of India

People in general are inclined to pass the blame on to others whatever the fault.  For example, we Indians love to blame the British for their alleged ‘divide-and-rule’ policy.  Did the British really divide India into Hindus and Muslims or did the Indians do it themselves?  Was there any unified entity called India in the first place before the British unified it? Having raised those questions, I’m going to commit a further sacrilege of quoting a British journalist-cum-historian.  In his magnum opus, India: a History , John Keay says that the “stock accusations of a wider Machiavellian intent to ‘divide and rule’ and to ‘stir up Hindu-Muslim animosity’” levelled against the British Raj made little sense when the freedom struggle was going on in India because there really was no unified India until the British unified it politically.  Communal divisions existed in India despite the political unification.  In fact, they existed even before the Briti...

Relatives and Antidepressants

One of the scenes that remain indelibly etched in my memory is from a novel of Malayalam writer O V Vijayan. Father and little son are on a walk. Father tells son, “Walk carefully, son, otherwise you may fall down.” Son: “What will happen if I fall?” Father: "Relatives will laugh.” I seldom feel comfortable with my relatives. In fact, I don’t feel comfortable in any society, but relatives make it more uneasy. The reason, as I’ve understood, is that your relatives are the last people to see any goodness in you. On the other hand, they are the first ones to discover all your faults. Whenever certain relatives visit, my knees buckle and the blood pressure shoots up. I behave quite awkwardly. They often describe my behaviour as arising from my ego, which used to be a oversized in yesteryear. I had a few such visitors the other day. The problem was particularly compounded by their informing me that they would be arriving by about 3.30 pm and actually reaching at about 7.30 pm. ...