Thoughts on the new National Education Policy (NEP)

The new NEP has tried to address many of the shortcomings of the existing policy that was put in place in the Eighties, and hopes to meet the needs of the nation in the next thirty to forty years.

But before looking at the NEP, we need to understand the objectives of the education system.

As I see it, our education system has four objectives.

1. To provide the necessary knowledge and skills that can help the student earn a living and become a productive member of society
2. To generate knowledge through deep learning and research as well as ensuring survival of culture and cultural knowledge
3. To promote learning for the sake of learning thereby increasing one’s own knowledge and value
4. To provide employment opportunities to teachers

From what I have read about the NEP it definitely addresses all the above objectives. What needs to be seen is how effective the implementation will be at the ground level.

I have tried to put together my initial thoughts on some of the aspects of the NEP here.

I like the concept of allowing students the option of not having to do the full four years of a degree course and awarding of diplomas and certificates for one, two and three years of study. I hope the same can also be applied for B.Ed degrees for teachers as well and they can start teaching lower grades after one or two years with a diploma instead of having to do the full four years.

I don’t know if I have missed it, but I feel the NEP should recognize the value of industry experience and allow those with experience to teach – especially in professional courses like Engineering, Medicine, Management etc. Maybe some guidelines for equivalence could be drawn up. This is very important as this can give students proper exposure to the industry while still learning.

One interesting point that has captured a lot of attention is the emphasis on use of local language or mother tongue as the medium of instruction till at least class five by all schools. If I am not mistaken, most government schools already follow this, and this is a reason why many students who come from these schools face great difficulties when having to study in English in the higher classes or in college. With increasing Glocalization, the ability to be conversant in an international language would definitely be an advantage. Which is why, I thought that adding English to the curriculum earlier would have been an option wherever possible. 

Here, I hasten to add that there is no disrespect intended at all towards any Indian language and I completely accept that learning is easier in one's mother tongue.

While on the topic of primary and elementary education, I feel there is a need to involve parents from the outset. Parents need to understand that they have to be actively involved in their child’s education and this cannot be left entirely to the formal education system. This brings us to the need for specialized courses which can provide parents-to-be with the tools to guide their children, till such time they are not part of the formal system. This could also allow for a delayed entry of the child at the age of five or six instead of at three.

Finally, while I think the NEP has addressed this issue, I would like to emphasize the need for curriculum's to shift from a memory based learning system to a system where the student is taught to use the data and information available. This is in some ways akin to having an open book exam system, but with emphasis on teaching students to use their minds to infer and solve rather than only remember. While this is easy to say, it needs a huge amount of change for both the administrators as well as teachers to put in place, and needs a lot of time.

This is very important because unlike in the past, we are rapidly approaching a perfect storm of a large employment seeking population, decrease in availability of jobs and requirement of high level thinking ability for available jobs. The main reason for this is the exponential increase in the use of a combination of Automation, Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning.

Increasing use of automation in manufacturing will bring a huge decrease in requirement of manpower. The side effect to this is with automated manufacturing and increased in the quality of products, the requirement for repairs and maintenance will also come down, leading to a proportionate decrease in requirement of maintenance and service personnel.

Similarly, the strides made in Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning are making inroads into the domain of knowledge workers, and this will again lead to a decrease in the number of available jobs in those fields.

American author, inventor and futurist Raymond Kurzweil has predicted that a $1,000 personal computer will be 1,000 times more powerful than the human brain by 2029 and by 2050, it will be possible for computers to assimilate the knowledge of the entire human race.

For a country like India, this approaching perfect storm could be a disaster if we are not prepared for it, and our only means of facing this storm is ensuring our children have the education they need. The NEP should therefore not become fixed as the previous one was, but be dynamic in nature and allow for changes and pivots as required so that our children are properly equipped for the future.