NEP 2020 ignores crisis in education
October 12 2023
NEP 2020 ignores the crisis in education among the marginalized majority in rural India
In its orientation and methods, the National Education policy 2020 (NEP) is a layered document that recommends significant structural changes to the education system, dips into the constructed imaginaries of a past glorious India which will be retrieved via education, co-opts some progressive ideas for education, and overall acts as a guiding star for the aspirations of the urban middle-classes. But either deliberately or by the limited understanding of the committee members. In this article read about NEP 2020 ignores crisis in education.
Although NEP claims that the aim of education is to realize “full human potential, develop an equitable and just society”, it fails to cater to the requirements of rural India’s marginalized majority, who in numerous ways are rendered into being subjects instead of citizens.
NEP overlooks the complexity of up to date rural India, which is marked by a pointy deceleration of its economy, extant sorts of distress, and pauperization of a majority of its citizens.
Although the NEP claims to “bridge gaps in access, participation and learning outcomes’’, it overlooks the very fact that poor quality education marks and mars the lives of rural citizens. Neglecting to interact with any idea of fostering equality of educational opportunity with equality in quality education, the NEP fails to deal with the growing school differentiation during which government schools are now primarily attended by children of disadvantaged castes and Adivasi groups, while a mushrooming of personal schools cater to the aspirations of the more advantaged castes and classes. That such school differentiation defies the thought of education as a leveler and therefore the possibility of schooling acting as a shared experience that forges social coherence is a problem that the NEP committee seems to be oblivious of.
Growing privatization of education alongside no assurance of quality is placing an enormous burden on citizens and therefore the report takes no cognizance of such trends. the very fact that rural candidates are finding it increasingly difficult to realize entry into professional education and therefore the lack of fit between their degrees and the job market means several lakhs of them find themselves both “unemployable” and unemployed. These are issues that find no mention within the report.
Overlooking the overall adverse integration of the agricultural into the larger macroeconomy and into poor quality mass education, the report involves the “establishment of huge, multi-discipline universities and colleges” and places emphasis on online and distance learning (ODL), without listening to the very fact that correspondence courses and distance education degrees became a source of revenue generation for universities and institutions and are run without guarantees of quality. The report fails to require under consideration the impact of poor-quality education on rural youth who, in some ways, are manifesting signs of alienation from their roots, are disaffected and amenable to being recruited into violent anti-social activities.
Recent reports of accelerating suicides among youth are another indicator of the deep distress that they're experiencing. The NEP involves education institutes to market and supports the teaching of “look vidya” and it highlights the importance of yoga, AYUSH, and Sanskrit, which may be taught alongside AI, machine learning, and digital learning, in order that youth are often prepared for a worldwide economy. during this narrow perspective, there's no scope for considering the establishment of smaller regional learning centers during which the youth are often taught a variety of revamped older knowledge systems alongside newer skills and knowledge.
The possibility of forging and promoting environmental studies for local ecological restoration and conservation, agro-ecologies which will draw on the numerous sophisticated regional agricultural knowledge and practices, reviving local health and healing traditions from the vast repertoire of medical knowledge, or recognizing vernacular architectural traditions and skills, and a variety of artisan and craftsmanship to use local resources and thereby generate both employment and revive regional economies finds no mention within the least in the NEP.
Such measures can create a pool of skilled and employable youth who may make meaningful lives within the rural itself instead of becoming a part of the tide of migrant labor whose insecure and precarious lives were only too evident during the lockdown return migration. The NEP draws on its neoliberal economic ideas and moots the likelihood of building “Special Education Zones” in disadvantaged areas and in “aspirational districts”. But the report provides no details on how such SEZs will function and who are going to be the beneficiaries of such institutions. Will such institutions be supported the models of Kota’s entrance examination coaching industry or will it's just like the way during which Challakere, a pastoral region 120 km from Bengaluru, was carved out by displacing local pastoralists and fauna and establishing a “Science City” that mixes a solar power field, a nuclear processing site, and a campus for undergraduates of the Indian Institute of Science?
Although the report claims that the aim of education is to realize “full human potential, develop an equitable and just society and promote national development”, it fails to cater to the requirements of rural India’s marginalized majority, who in numerous ways are rendered into being subjects instead of citizens.
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