Decoding the agenda of the new National Education Policy

The Union Cabinet’s approval of N ational Education Policy 2020 on July 29, was preceded by significant moves by the Government of India, which revealed the ideological framework of the policy. Yet, the NEP proposes to over-centralise all key decision-making “from ECCE to higher education” through a spectrum of new central agencies and mechanisms to be constituted/instituted; for example, the Higher Education Commission of India, the National Research Foundation, the National Curricular and Pedagogical Framework for ECCE, the General Education Council, the National Testing Agency, National Professional Standards for Teachers, and so on. Early introduction of EMI is thus viewed as impairing learning in the formative years and limiting educational attainment.” The NEP’s proposal on the mother tongue/home language issue is not just deliberately ambiguous and confusing; it also overburdens the child with the language curriculum, which includes the emphasis on learning a classical language at all stages of education, including higher education, even as classical and rich languages such as Tamil, Pali and Persian are accorded step-child status. Higher Education The NEP’s higher education proposals imply: Starving government degree colleges and State universities of funds, forcing them to become indebted to the market, eventually leading to their closure; Incrementally handing over higher education institutions to private capital under the pretext of promoting philanthropy, which is yet another neoliberal excuse to pass on public funds to India Inc. under the modified PPP, that is, Public Philanthropic Partnership; Exacerbation of the present rate of exclusion of Bahujans and the disabled from higher education by not just giving freedom to the HEI to hike up their fees but also by essentially withdrawing the social justice agenda, especially reservation, and distortion of the concept of scholarships/fellowships by linking it to the so-called “merit” which sociologically implies “privileges, rooted in class, caste and patriarchy, on the one hand and linguistic and metropolitan hegemony” on the other; Reducing knowledge to mere skills under the pretext of vocational education from “ECCE to higher education”, despite the repeated claims of “no hard separation between... academics and vocational education”, thereby diverting Bahujan students from academics to parental caste-based occupations and other low-wage skills; viewing critical thinking, creativity and scientific temper as mere skills; distorting knowledge-related parameters to those of Skill India’s notions ; Demolishing the research-based knowledge production in HEIs by over-centralisation of the research agenda through the National Research Foundation, that is, taking away the excitement of research; and Establishing the hegemony of online education to homogenise knowledge as per market requirements; reducing knowledge to mere skills – both low-wage earning and high-wage earning, the latter category being entirely enslaved to the global market framework; and dehumanising education by eliminating human interaction both between teacher and students and among students themselves, thereby also depoliticising the education system. Problematic Areas and Issues i) The NEP fails to commit itself to a common school system based on neighbourhood schools for all children, irrespective of their socio-economic status; ii) It has no plan to do away with the discrimination-based multi-layered school system; iii) It does not commit to replace contract and ad hoc teachers with dignified service conditions; nor does it take a stand against their deployment in census, election It does not call for amending the RTE Act, 2009, to include children in the 3-6 and 14-18 age groups, thereby denying statutory status to both ECCE and secondary-senior secondary; v) It refuses to ban commoditisation of knowledge and trade in education; and vi) It takes no stand against the intervention of the World Bank in school education and the World Trade Organisation’s regime in higher education.