Page 32 - EducationWorld September 2020

Expert Comment

NEP 2020: Disappointing

philosophy

SHIV VISVANATHAN

HE NATIONAL EDUCATION POLICY (NEP) €ere are two ways of reading the policy.
2020, released on July 29, is being celebrated One can read it as a shopping list in an
by many as a great document, the BJP/NDA 2.0
Tgovernment’s gift to the nation to mark the 74th education supermarket or read it to
anniversary of independence. I was looking forward to cel- understand the philosophy underlying
ebrating it, hoping it would be a continuation of the monu-
mental Radhakrishnan (1948) and Kothari (1967) national it. When one takes the second option,
education policy reports. NEP 2020 is disappointing
But after reading it, I experienced shock, almost unease.
It reminded me of the line of questioning the great citizen
scientist and energy expert Amulya Reddy used to adopt
with his students. Whenever they answered his questions Number and language have to go hand in hand but ecolacy
by way of newspaper headlines, Reddy would insist: “Tell is an absentee concept in the report. As a result, the idea
me what’s in the third paragraph”. He was aware that there of diversity and plurality is not worked out systemically or
were gaps in the way most students thought. Reddy was systematically. Diversity is the theory of difference. Differ-
quick to spot the gaps between the philosophy and ter- ence needs syncretism and dialogue and there’s no sense of
minology of an idea. Most students don’t understand the it in the pedagogies prescribed by the new policy. Moreover
culture of the worlds they inhabit. Secondly, their ritual of diversity is an epistemic category. But in the policy a sense
operationalisation of ideas tends to be skimpy. They usu- of pedagogy is projected without a sense of epistemology.
ally institutionalise a process instead of a value framework. NEP 2020 could have done with some grounding in the
This statement was brilliantly illustrated by a Tibetan sociology of knowledge. It blackboxes science and technol-
monk teaching at MIT, Boston, who observed that when ogy as immaculate concepts.
notions of efficiency and instrumentality are introduced in nfortunately, in the new education policy presented to
education, schools became joyless places and education a Uthe nation after a gap of 34 years — there’s no convinc-
dismal science. NEP 2020 is a testimony to this learned ing explanation except that thousands were consulted — is
monk’s insight. full of cliches and reiterations of the obvious. It says every
There are two ways of reading the report. One can read it child must be located in a culture but there’s no definition of
as a shopping list in an education supermarket or read it to culture. In fact, if one made a checklist of the great intellec-
understand the philosophy underlying it. When one takes tual revolutions that followed the industrial and especially
the second option, NEP 2020 is disappointing. Although the linguistic, information and knowledge revolutions, one
this makes me a marginal outlier one cannot doff the hat senses NEP 2020 is still tackling the industrial revolution.
to an exercise of rank illiteracy. It’s a prescription with a Victorian mindset presented as a
NEP 2020 has several basic flaws that need to be high- futuristic document. It propagates multilinguism and mul-
lighted. First, is the idea of childhood. Childhood is an era of tidisciplinarity but it seems to have no understanding of
dreams, myths and socialisation through play. It’s a period the philosophy underlying these concepts. It has nothing to
of freedom and anarchy. But to make childhood relevant, say about the depth of orality by legislation or little about
the policy treats childhood education as an industrialist, translation. As few of the concepts it uses have a sense of
Taylorist, Fordist system. In fact, if one grasps the meta- embeddedness or heuristic, it has little sense of the philoso-
phor, NEP 2020 envisages childhood education as a rocket phy of knowledge. Multidisciplinarity and multilinguism
fired in stages. There’s little awareness of the dreams of are fashionable terms sprinkled around rather than epis-
Montessori, Tagore or Geddes in this document because it temologies for the future. Moreover, the report discusses
lacks sense of play, the idea of homo ludens (‘playful man’) pedagogy without any theory of knowledge creation.
that the Dutch scholar Johan Huizinga eulogised. Without Perhaps because it has been restricted to 65 pages, NEP
playfulness and the smell of it, policy instrumentalises edu- 2020 conveys the sense that the information revolution has
cation. happened without the knowledge revolution. The same dis-
Moreover, there’s an incompleteness in the develop- creteness of concepts atomizes many of the terms blurring
ment of ideas in the NEP 2020 that needs to be highlight- the links between diversity and sustainability, diversity
ed. First, it confuses freedom with choice. Freedom as a and plurality. I remember my father, a scientist, telling me
philosophy lets one articulate the framework of choice. In when concepts are not clear, policy prescriptions become
NEP 2020, choice is presented as a fixed questionnaire. pompous. There’s a pervasive pomposity in the National
This is evident in its prescription for universal literacy and Education Policy 2020.
numeracy. Educationists tend to stress that the two terms (Shiv Visvanathan is director of the Centre for the Study of Knowledge
are not complete without ecolacy (environment awareness). Systems at O.P. Jindal Global University, Sonipat)

32 EDUCATIONWORLD SEPTEMBER 2020