NEP 2020: Over-ambitious exercise to bring Harvard in Hyderabad during sad, struggling times?

The timing is puzzling for some. At a time when the country is staring at a black hole, with the economy sliding, confidence at an alltime low and the pandemic showing no sign of easing, the Government comes up with a New Education Policy and announces it with a roll of drums.

Others do not find the timing wrong. In the sixth year of the NDA Government, with nothing going right for them, it was just the right time to hold out a slick document and pretend that the solution to all our ills have been found. Doesn’t a government in the middle of its term, or midstream, turn to new policies? So, we have been gifted our third NEP (New Education Policy).

The government has been quick to defend itself for not putting up the draft before the Parliament. Consultations, it argued, had been going on for six years and building a new generation of young Indians grounded in nationalism and capable of thinking out-of-the-box to deal with challenges thrown up by technology could not wait. It is a different matter that the Centre appears to have paid no attention to critiques of the draft policy, before junking them.

Speaking at the Smart India Hackathon, the PM spoke glowingly about the NEP. He claimed that unlike earlier policies, NEP-2020 emphasised multi-lingualism. It would make teaching primary classes in the local vernacular language mandatory so that they learn faster and better. The Policy would do away with learning by rote and parroting clichés and encourage students to ‘learn, question and solve…This is not a policy. But a battle plan,’ he roared. Then the Prime Minister claimed that Tagore, Aryabhatt and Leonardo Da Vinci were the driving ideals behind NEP. All students would be free to chase their own dreams and passion and study Maths with Music, a flexibility that several other countries have had for years.

There is a Hindi saying, Andhe ki Joru, Sabki Bhabhi (The wife of a blind man is game for flirting by everyone). One such wife in India is its vast government run chain of primary and secondary schools. And the truth, reflected in data and excellent annual reports of ASER, is that our government school system remains deeply flawed. So, when anyone familiar with the ground realities of India in 2020, reads the NEP, they see it as an over-ambitious exercise, trying hard to appear intellectually agile but ending up as a document that is somewhat pompous and faintly absurd. The almost total silence on how the network of government schools can be revived and improved is also underwhelming.

And the NEP is not really new either. Take for instance its insistence on teaching children in their mother tongue, an idea doing the rounds since the 60s. Given the fast paced privatisation of schools in the last decade, continuing with Matrubhasha mein Shiksha, has already created a deep divide between children who attend government run schools and those who can afford to and have opted for private English medium schools. The silence on how to bridge the divide is also troubling.

We all know that in 2020 most college level teaching, especially in sciences and management education, happens in English. So, children from vernacular medium schools, even if they clear entrance tests for entering the IITs and IIMs, are handicapped by their lack of familiarity with English. Besides in a globalised world of digital learning, English is indisputably a far bigger guarantor of respectable education, employment and admission into good colleges.

The PM wants college students to stop seeking jobs. They should be job-generators and not job-seekers, he said. In an age when jobs are drying up universally, banks are wary of giving loans and parents are being forced to pull children out of more expensive private schools, the NEP merrily hopes for the best of foreign universities opening campuses in new India. Harvard at Haridwar? Who, may one dare ask, will pay the substantial fees required to benefit from ‘foren’ universities in India is the question. The hard fact is that despite decent salaries, most schools in small towns and villages are short of good teachers and regular supply of teaching and learning materials which now includes smart phones and laptops. The Internet speed is slow, the smart phone penetration is still 30% of the population and average income and wealth is not what the PM and his advisors think they are.

With Notebandi and Talaabandi, family incomes have atrophied and girls have been the foremost victims. Their dropout rates in all government schools continue to be alarming. One reads scary tales of a father selling his cow to buy a smart phone for his child so that he could access online classes during the lockdown; or of students whose families could not afford a smart phone committing suicide.

Is this really the right time to even discuss how to alter radically the concept of education within a deeply divided and flawed system? The NEP looks like a compendium of all that is lofty, good and may have worked in other countries. But in the absence of closer scrutiny and not sufficient discussion in public, one remains a sceptic. Mother tongue as medium of instruction in primary classes sounds good on paper but for a Odiya serving in Punjab or a Punjabi serving in Puducherry, it means nothing.

The anger of Eliza Doolittle, the archetypal victim of linguistic experimentation, comes to mind. She tells the Professor trying to posh her up to prove his point. “I am a child in your country. I have forgotten my own language and can speak nothing but yours.”