NEP: Trick or Treat?

Context: Actualisation of The New Education Policy depends on its operationalisation by identifying strategic norms and conditions for its efficient implementation.

The New Education Policy 

• Focuses on early child development, learning outcomes, different forms of assessment, holistic education, and, most importantly, recognising the centrality of teacher and teacher education.
• Achieving universal foundational numeracy and literacy is the basic objective of NEP.
• Reoriention from disciplinary content to modes of inquiry allows accessibility to a wide variety of disciplines.

Issues in NEP Document

• The emphasis on critical thinking and free inquiry: without freeing universities from the political and cultural conformity. 
• Ambiguous language: i.e. preference to primary education in the mother tongue without curbing language choice for English. 
• Agnosticism over public versus private education: both in school and higher education. 
• Drops the word multidisciplinary: without explicating what it means. 
• Lack of clarity over availability of diploma or early exit options: i.e whether within a single institution or different institutions offer different kinds of degrees. 
• Structuring a curriculum for a classroom that has both one-year diploma students and four-year degree students takes away from the identity of the institution. 
• Exercising of exit options depends on financial circumstances of the student.
• Forced multidisciplinary for all HEI’s: betrays the principle that different institutions have different identities, comparative advantages, pedagogical philosophies, and a different mission. 
• Deprive students for the choice of a diversity of institutions.
• Risks creating a new kind of institutional isomorphism: mandated from the Centre.
• Contradicts the principle of shift from exams to learning: by recommending a national aptitude test and thereby raising the need for coaching institutes.

Conclusion: A free education system cannot flourish without a free and equal society in terms of income and social variables.