Transforming education paradigm

The government recently put out the draft for its New Education Policy (NEP). It is clearly ambitious but alarming as well. Considering the drastic changes that it is projecting for the existing system, it would seem that the current education system in India has completely broken down. Education in India has been a constant battle of resources and possibly of short-sightedness to keep abreast of the changing environment. It has been caught in a quagmire that is based on the inability to provide adequate infrastructure for an impossibly large population. Despite that, we have nurtured some of the best scholars, scientists, economists and thinkers in the world. The era of the 'Brain drain' where the best migrate to other countries for want of economic opportunities in India continues even today. Many Indians from the current education system are being mandated for the top positions of large global corporations. Justice Madan Lokur, who retired from the Supreme Court of India, been invited to join the Supreme Court of New Zealand is a recent example. Clearly, the education system in India has not entirely failed.

Yes, of course, our education needs to be improved because improvement is the essence of progress. Whether we like it or not, global realities are changing and technology is changing the way we function. We need an education policy that is realistic, understands the emerging needs of the industry and society, and fosters skills required to be more competitive in an economically deprived lifestyle that we are facing in India. The government has the responsibility to make decisions and policies that are based on practical realities and unbiased root cause analysis, not personal ideologies. NEP draft could well be the first indicator of how serious the government is in its root cause analysis and how the political mandate is going to shape the new India.

The NEP may be new but there is really little in it that is new. Most of the deliverables mentioned in the policy, including the moral values, scientific temper, and pride in heritage are ones that I have internalised during my own educational journey in life in the existing education system. However, what I find new and certainly very welcoming is the emphasis on pedagogy reforms for 'Learning how to learn' and the realisation that preschool plays a very critical role in creating a foundation for life-long learning, impacting the adult life of a child. Though it is native intelligence today, it is perhaps the first official acceptance in educational policies that early brain development starts happening during the preschool years. While the emphasis on preschool years and the emphasis to learn pedagogy are critical, they are the most difficult to handle.

My own experience is that it will demand a mammoth effort, training, and reorientation of the faculty even while ensuring that the faculty itself stays abreast of global developments. I have been working with some of my colleagues on both these issues over the past few years; as a mentor to a preschool and as an academic advisor to established management schools. The effort has been to move away from rote learning and to experiment with reconstructing some of the existing courses so that we could help students focus on learning rather than just grasp knowledge. The emphasis is also on conducting training labs where we engage with students to help them understand how to learn. Though results have been outstanding, this process is very demanding and the faculty also had to work harder.

The NEP is misleading. It sounds pragmatic and well-intentioned. But when you start going into the granular details of the thought process, contradictions in the educational policy start kicking-in. Let us look at the vision for the NEP which itself raises questions. "The NEP 2019 envisions an India centred education system that contributes directly to transforming our nation sustainably into an equitable and vibrant knowledge society, by providing high-quality education to all". The fault lines that stand out immediately are in the emphasis on 'India specific' and 'Equitable'. Education is an absolute and universal understanding of the world around us and the purpose should only be to create awareness, develop a scientific temper and the ability to question so that we can use our knowledge to better the existing. The emphasis on India centred is unnecessary and only creates interpretational issues and raises the red flag for possible ideological bias, which should not have any place in education. Further, education cannot be equitable though we could strive to make education accessible. The focus appears to be more social and political rather than developing capabilities that would foster economic growth and employment. It says education and schools are not 'marketable products' because that concentrates power in the hands of schools vis-à-vis users. Yet, when it starts talking about higher education and globalisation of education, the policy clearly states that a systematic brand-building campaign will be undertaken for attracting students from abroad which is marketing after all. The fact is that there is nothing wrong in allowing education to be a profit-making industry as long as the quality of education is ensured.

The preamble to what the NEP is supposed to do is interesting to read, even though tiresome. It covers everything from how good and holistic India's traditional education system was and the need to preserve that. It recognises India's diverse culture and talks of the need to preserve that even as it accepts that the future is changing fast and we need to be prepared for that. Yet, it wants to make the knowledge economy equitable. We seem to forget that India has changed since ancient times. We are now a huge population with extreme disparity and the traditional gurukul system will require mammoth modifications before it can become effective. The more I read the preamble itself, the more concerned I become. NEP is relying majorly on the ability to create effective school infrastructure and ensuring the participation of local communities and volunteer involvement on an unpaid basis. From a situation today where we have inadequately trained teachers even on a paid basis, we are wanting to take unpaid and untrained volunteers as key pillars for success, especially on a mass scale. Are we even geared to overcome the gigantic problems that could be created when untrained people teach kids? India is a very diverse country where every region has deep-seated views, and many of them are actually archaic and negative.

The proposed switch from 10+2 system to a 5+3+3+4 system has some progressive elements but is still highly debatable. While indicating some understanding of the educational journey, it needs to delve deeper. We are starting to micromanage the system. Preschool by its very terminology is the stage before you get into the schooling system and needs to be stress-free. If the objective is, and correctly so, to follow a play-based, activity-based and discovery-based learning in the preschool years, then the stipulation that all children from preschool must start learning three or more languages is counterproductive to the concept of the preschool. The moment we club it with the foundation years as '5' or first stage of formal schooling, we are already putting the child and the parents into the schooling trap. Switching to a pedagogy that allows students in the '+4' stage to make their life decisions is hasty. It is all very well to say that education must come hand in hand with student empowerment and choice. Students also need guidance, especially in Indian society. We need to acknowledge that most children in grade 9 today are still struggling with themselves and almost certainly do not know what they want in life. To expect them to go through fundamental courses across a wide multitude of subjects in 8 semesters is likely to be inadequate for them to identify their long term interests and could possibly end up being more stressful than the current educational system.

The proposed NEP is taking holistic development to an extreme when it stipulates that there should be no extracurricular and co-curricular activities and that all activities should be treated as curricular. We need to stay clear on the core activities of the learning process and the support activities. The process of 'Learning to learn' needs to focus and as underscored in our traditional thinking, should remain concentrated on the eye of the fish. The role of the extracurricular activities is to make us capable in mind, body, and spirit to achieve that concentration and focus. It should not be a part of the curriculum or an end in itself in education.

While there is some merit in the NEP document, it fails on the simple and well-researched premise that any document, especially a policy document should meet. When you put the vision, policy highlights and recommendations next to each other in one-page summary, only then will you see the clear logic and alignment with the vision. The NEP draft is over 450 pages and laborious to go through, perhaps deliberately.

I am not a policymaker but only a professional who has studied and worked in India and watched with dismay how lightly we set out visions without much debate and create policies that are like straws in the wind. I believe that education policy should not be a dream of utopia. Instead, it needs to achieve specific objectives realistically, utilising the resources available and creating a framework to overcome challenges. It is good to see an emphasis on ethics and moral values but when the same document does not mention Nehru amongst the great Indians of history, the document undermines its own credibility. Nehru is a key architect of modern India, irrespective of whether you believe in his ideology or not. Such bias in educational policy is ominous. I really hope that this draft policy will go through careful deliberations. India is now too big to be following an education policy that is largely dependent for its success on society and unpaid volunteers. It needs a vision, a strategy and an accountability mechanism to accomplish the vision. The vision cannot be a dream that is floated in clouds. It needs to be sharper. My own vision for education in India is as follows: " To create a vibrant knowledge society that embraces the best in scientific and traditional temper to create a sustainable economy and social structure, where the mind is liberated through education and encourages the ability to question, explore, innovate and accelerate emotional and material progress".

Our failure on the current academic front is primarily in the vacuum that exists today in the quality and purpose of education and the inability to relate it to jobs and economic prosperity–cause of dropouts and gross enrolment ratios for schools. Neither of these issues has been tackled or addressed in the real sense. The NEP is an all-inclusive utopian document that presumes extensive community support, without remuneration, and a proliferation of institutions and educational complexes when there is already a severe gap in teaching resources even for existing institutions. There is nothing innovative or out of the box about the policy that should make us sit up with excitement and say Eureka!

(Himanshu Manglik is founder and mentor of WALNUT CAP Consulting LLP. The views expressed are strictly personal)