– Shiv Visvanathan is director of the Centre for the Study of Knowledge Systems at O.P. Jindal Global University, Sonipat The National Education Policy (NEP) 2020, released on July 29, is being celebrated by many as a great document, the BJP/NDA 2.0 government’s gift to the nation to mark the 74th anniversary of independence. I was looking forward to celebrating it, hoping it would be a continuation of the monumental Radhakrishnan (1948) and Kothari (1967) national education policy reports. 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 by way of newspaper headlines, Reddy would insist: “Tell me what’s in the third paragraph”. He was aware that there were gaps in the way most students thought. Reddy was quick to spot the gaps between the philosophy and terminology of an idea. Most students don’t understand the culture of the worlds they inhabit. Secondly, their ritual of operationalisation of ideas tends to be skimpy. They usually institutionalise a process instead of a value framework This statement was brilliantly illustrated by a Tibetan monk teaching at MIT, Boston, who observed that when notions of efficiency and instrumentality are introduced in education, schools became joyless places and education a dismal science. NEP 2020 is a testimony to this learned monk’s insight There are two ways of reading the report. One can read it as a shopping list in an education supermarket or read it to understand the philosophy underlying it. When one takes the second option, NEP 2020 is disappointing. Although this makes me a marginal outlier one cannot doff the hat to an exercise of rank illiteracy. NEP 2020 has several basic flaws that need to be highlighted. First, is the idea of childhood. Childhood is an era of dreams, myths and socialisation through play. It’s a period of freedom and anarchy. But to make childhood relevant, the policy treats childhood education as an industrialist, Taylorist, Fordist system. In fact, if one grasps the metaphor, NEP 2020 envisages childhood education as a rocket fired in stages. There’s little awareness of the dreams of Montessori, Tagore or Geddes in this document because it lacks sense of play, the idea of homo ludens (‘playful man’) that the Dutch scholar Johan Huizinga eulogised. Without playfulness and the smell of it, policy instrumentalises education. Moreover, there’s an incompleteness in the development of ideas in the NEP 2020 that needs to be highlighted. First, it confuses freedom with choice. Freedom as a philosophy lets one articulate the framework of choice. In NEP 2020, choice is presented as a fixed questionnaire. This is evident in its prescription for universal literacy and numeracy. Educationists tend to stress that the two terms are not complete without ecolacy (environment awareness). Number and language have to go hand in hand but ecolacy is an absentee concept in the report. As a result, the idea…
