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.

 

Proselytisation Posing as Policy

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.