India's NEP 2020 - Not Paying Attention

 

It was instructive that probably the most consequential event in the life of the Republic merited nothing more than three pro-forma single-sentence references to “epidemics and pandemics” in the National Education Policy 2020. The Policy must have been discussed and agreed by the Union Cabinet while dressed in masks, a clear and present reminder of how much has changed. Yet, the document they approved acknowledges COVID-19 only to exhort higher education institutions to undertake epidemiological research and advocate greater use of technology in delivery mechanisms.

That is a pity. COVID-19 has brought lessons in its wake that we will ignore at our peril. In a societal sense, the pandemic has laid bare the fragile and counter-productive assumptions that underpin the way we have organised ourselves. Education, as the primary mechanism that drives long-term change in a society, must respond in a way that protects and strengthens children today and the nation tomorrow.

Three important mechanisms of social organisation that have been taken for granted in education during recent decades are institutionalisation, urbanisation and globalisation. If COVID-19 is not a one-off event, and there is no reason to assume that it is given how exploitative our engagement with our environment continues to be, each one of them must be reassessed for worth, especially for how they affect the future of our children.

Institutionalisation has promoted the idea that the only learning worth our children’s time and our money is the one that is provided in schools, colleges and universities. Across most of the world, this has made learning information-centric and uncritical. It has packed children into rows and columns in classrooms and made them unfamiliar with their surroundings. It has taken them away from productive use of their hands and bodies and valorised “brain work”, creating an artificial crisis of periodic unemployment (even before the unimaginable destruction of employment caused by COVID-19). It has snapped their connections with their land, their environment, their culture and their communities, replacing them with words in ink on paper. In India, a mindless pedagogy has further ensured that institutionalisation fails even in its own objectives, as student achievement on its “learning metrics”, mainly focussed on literacy, numeracy and data, has kept falling.

By closing anganwadis, COVID-19 has brought attention squarely to the role of parents in the holistic development of their young children. (We started Sajag, a programme for coaching caregivers in nurturing care in April 2020. It now reaches over 1.5 million families and is set to expand further. Many others have started similar programmes.) By forcing the closure of schools and colleges, COVID-19 presents us with the opportunity to explore what exactly is being lost when schools close. It also creates the possibility that we will discover how much there is to learn in communities, on land, in relationship, and in discovery and invention, even when schools are closed. It has the promise of suggesting a radical overhaul of what we value in school education.

Urbanisation has caused us to believe that ghettoization of people in cities is inevitable as we “develop”. With economic and social policies in most countries oriented towards this shibboleth, we have seen unhygienic living grow exponentially in the cities, even as rural communities have been devastated by the loss of populations. Mental health challenges in urban communities have become alarming, accentuated simply by the inhuman stresses that accompany urban living. For our young, it has meant few physical spaces for wholesome growth and play, little opportunity for meaningful community engagement and a social landscape tragically barren of nurturing experiences.

By attacking densely-packed urban communities disproportionately, COVID-19 has laid bare the fallacy of organising ourselves solely for economic efficiency. It asks us to reconsider how physical communities should be laid out, how large they should be, how they should harmonise into the surrounding landscape and how their cultural, economic and political sinews should function.

We have also been fed the inevitability of globalisation, almost as a primal force. It is true that it promises economic efficiency, but we have, in the process, lost much. Diversity is the essence of risk reduction and long-term survival and thriving, whether at the level of an organisation, a community, a nation, or indeed, evolution of life itself. In a few short decades, blinded by the promise of economic efficiency, we have traded diversity away for massive inequality and loss of local skills, trades, crafts, self-reliance, agency and autonomy. Our text books, the only source of information promoted by our policies, have consistently failed to ignite an examination of the underlying assumptions and the all-too-visible outcomes among our children.

COVID-19 has alerted us to the downsides of these Faustian bargains. Its dramatic spread is certainly a result, with air travel having been the primary vector. The heart-breaking spectacle of tens of millions of migrant workers walking hundreds of kilometres and sleeping on asphalt roads in India’s scorching summer, is another. They discovered that they had no means of support, no community, no fall-back when their employment ceased. COVID-19 has also awakened us rudely to the reality that having the world’s fastest GDP growth rate is no protection against ending up with the world’s steepest fall in GDP and widespread misery.

To the extent that we continue to regard globalising as self-evidently good, we create the potential of damaging our children, inhibiting their learning and creating a world that is less fit for them. Time has come to drop the fiction that local wisdom is somehow inferior and to engage in a meaningful dialogue that hasn’t foreclosed on the alternatives.

To disregard such fundamental questions in an education policy adopted in the middle of the pandemic makes little sense. These should be the subject of widespread dialogue, including in our schools and colleges, before and after the adoption of the policy. The sensibilities that arise from such deliberations must inform our liberal education as well as the conduct of professions such as engineering, town planning, medicine, economics, sociology and, indeed, education.

An education policy that doesn’t even consider the questions relevant to how our education system should be structured has surely not paid attention.