Against the backdrop of pervasive confusion about the character and role of private schools in the national development effort, this detailed unprecedented report demolishes widely disseminated myths of Left liberal academics and shallow media about private K-12 education – Dilip Thakore The new National Education Policy 2020, presented to the nation by Union education minister Dr. Ramesh Pokhriyal ‘Nishank’ and his predecessor Prakash Javadekar on July 29, has received great acclamation from the Left-dominated India academy, and from the right-wing Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), the ideological mentor organisation of the BJP government at the Centre and in 12 states of the Indian Union. Four years in the making, NEP 2020 which comes after an interregnum of 34 years — the previous National Education Policy was presented to the nation in 1986 (reviewed in 1992) — has achieved this remarkable balancing act by reinforcing the neta-babu (politician bureaucrat/educrat) control and command architecture of post-independence India’s education system. The academy dominated by communists and fellow travelling Left liberals have acclaimed NEP 2020 because it multiplies the number of government policy formulation and regulatory agencies to direct and closely supervise and monitor the country’s pre-primary to PhD education institutions, especially private schools and higher education institutions which are anathema to them. The ideologues of the RSS have silently welcomed the new education policy because comprehensive government control of education clears the way for them to infiltrate the academy and rewrite Indian history proclaiming the glories of pre-Mughal Hindu kings, demonise Muslim rule over the subcontinent during 16-18th centuries, and in the fullness of time, revise the Constitution of India to establish a Hindu rashtra in which the country’s 200 million Muslims will become second class citizens, as Hindus are in neighbouring Pakistan. For this project to succeed, private education institutions have to be strictly monitored and controlled by the State Trapped between politicians and ideologues of the Left and Right singing hosannas of NEP 2020, is India’s educated middle class, including the intelligentsia, liberal academics, the media and educated upper middle class, aka the establishment, which shapes and moulds public opinion. Bombarded by continuous socialist propaganda and private enterprise bashing by freeloading academics and leftist media, India’s expanding middle class is suffering a massive Stockholm syndrome, becoming enamoured with post-independence India’s neta-babu brotherhood which has bound it in irons and chains for over seven decades since the assassination of Mahatma Gandhi by an RSS acolyte in 1948. The outcome of this perverse romance is mass schizophrenia. Although the entire middle class overwhelmingly enrols its children in fees-levying private K-12 schools despite the option of sending them to free-of-charge government schools, it endorses debilitating government control and command over private schools to prevent “commercialisation of education”. Against this backdrop of pervasive confusion about the character and role of private schools in the national development effort, the online release on July 22 of State of the Sector Report — Private Schools in India (hereafter PSIR 2020) — an unprecedented study commissioned and published by the…
