This is the note I wrote for the 2015-16 Annual Report of Centre for Learning Resources as its Director. I hope you will find it interesting. (To see the full Annual Report, please click here).
The big education policy event of
2016 in India is the making of … well, the National Education Policy, 2016
(NEP). Or is it?
Governments the world over have
sought to control what passes for education in schools. Many have called
schools an institution for brain-washing young minds so that they subscribe to
some particular idea of a nation. Others, more charitably, call it an exercise
in nation-building, especially necessary for “young” nations to help build a
sense of togetherness. They usually mean the same thing.
One wouldn’t think that India, the
land with a civilizational footprint millennia long, would need to invent the idea
of its nationhood afresh. One would imagine that the rich cultural, spiritual
and intellectual legacy of this land would provide a sufficiently nuanced and
complex bed in which to seed a variety of ideas and positions without anyone
feeling threatened. One would believe that the dominant sentiment that would
arise in this country would be: “I contain multitudes”.
However, the on-going debates
around NEP suggest that one would be wrong.
Most of the voices, on either
side of the debate, have tended to operate from the “how to convert them young
through education policy” paradigm. Like their predecessors over decades, the
protagonists mistakenly believe that they will transform a whole generation or
more of citizens if they can only grab control of the school curriculum.
After independence, this was
perhaps inevitable as we chose the unfamiliar motif of a written constitution
to be the new object of our allegiance. Insecurity around the success of that
project, especially given the horrific violence that accompanied freedom, would
have been enough for a determined proselytisation effort. Unfortunately, as it
became the default, unquestioned objective, each successive generation of education
policy makers has sought to find ways in which to imprint their particular
notion of India on the young minds.
Such fond wishing flies in the
face of much evidence to the contrary. The truth is that children’s attitudes
and beliefs are moulded by a lot of different environmental factors. The
preachy way in which schooling tries to do so is among the least effective of
them all.
Regardless, the “catch them
young” approach continues to be replicated in the current formulation of, and
debate around, NEP. Over the years, that obsession has created an education
system that specialises in preaching and shoving information down the throats
of the children. It gives little regard to whether what they are taught
integrates with their lived experiences, little regard to whether it builds
skills that might be useful to live a full life, little regard to creating
attitudes for living peacefully together. Most damagingly, it ensures that
children never learn the art of questioning the stories they are told, of
enquiring into the true nature of things, of challenging prejudices
constructively and doing so with consideration, respect and the need to
understand. So even though few today buy into the notion that big dams are the
temples of modern India, they lack the resources or the skills to meaningfully
enquire into what might be actually worthy of such an appellation. And India’s
anointment as a plastic surgery pioneer may draw sniggers or applause, depending
upon the prejudice, but rarely a deeper look into the ontology of such claims.
As the ability to discern, to
parse, to evaluate disappears from the classrooms, it is possible to tell the
young any story, true, false or slanted, without fear of challenge. Those who
seek to plasticise the young minds in hopes of leaving them with their own
imprints forget, and are often dismayed to discover, that such minds are
putty-like in face of competing ideologies as well.
It takes only a little thought to
draw the line from poor development of these faculties to the pervasive fracturing
of our society today, the entrenched injustice and oppression, the ease with
which narratives of violence take hold and the lack of meaning our young
struggle with. A generation schooled to not
use reason in day to day engagements will not use reason when faced with
serious challenges of life. A school day
that doesn’t help children learn respect through experiencing it (as opposed to
being preached at) will create individuals who have trouble respecting others.
If schooling prepares children primarily
to serve as foot soldiers in the cause of advancing technology, as the draft
NEP seems weighed down by, they will fail to recognise, and act from, their
value to their communities when they grow up.
The current debates on the NEP
have largely failed to challenge it on the basis of how we really need to
change our education system. Today, we need a dialogue that rejects both the
tendency to dwell a thousand years in the past on the one hand and to craft an
unmoored identity by denying our traditions on the other. We need a policy that
privileges a curriculum fostering deep enquiry, creativity, engagement and respect. However, this can
only happen if we step back from the fruitless attempts of trying to mould our
children in our images.
Of course, we can just go on
doing what we have for the last 70 years and make the NEP a non-event.
Unfortunately, we probably will.
