During the past several months, I have witnessed a flurry of high-energy activity in the realm of education all across our land. Much of this has been centred around discussions and conferences related to the National Education Policy or the NEP as it is known in everyday parlance. The chief preoccupation with and worry of so many of our educational institutions appears to be two-fold. For one, many of them seem to be clueless about the intent and contents of the policy document. Secondly and as a consequence of the first pre-occupation, they are largely running about in a manner reminiscent of intimidated and clueless rabbits in a warren. This is putting our education environment in jeopardy. The sooner remedial action is taken—at a national level—the better.
This brings us to the moot issue of identifying the features of what is needed in terms of remedial intervention that are drawn from the NEP document. To my mind, one of the most urgent and necessary needs is to create a simpler and easier-to-comprehend step-by-step version of the NEP that embodies in a clear and very practical manner the salient features of the mother document. For instance, no matter what else the NEP prescribes, there is one major feature of the NEP that cries out for our attention from every single page of the policy document.
This is a very urgent and extremely important need to lay down with simplicity and clarity the prescriptions on pedagogy as required by the NEP. Lest the reader begins to get the impression that there is something of the order of rocket science complexity involved in this exercise, let me disabuse all of such a notion. The NEP prescribes with clarity that the pedagogy must move away to a significant extent from the blackboard and rote-learning-based model. This practice is acutely and widely prevalent in almost all parts of India and that too from the level of kindergarten to the highest levels of university teaching. It has killed creative thinking in the minds of our students. They have been made to realise that memorising alone shall get them through the world of studies. That may well be because our modes of assessment are so short of using examinations as a means to enable the student. All they seem to be after is to devise means and ways of disabling the student.
India needs to move away from a model where testing becomes an integral part of the pedagogy and this pedagogy must draw a balance between the blackboard and the classroom on the one hand and the real world on the other hand. In other words, the student must be exposed to the needs and challenges of the world around us through the curriculum with good emphasis on project-based hands-on learning where the teacher becomes a mentor. The NEP calls for this in such a clear fashion.
Dinesh Singh
Former Vice-Chancellor, Delhi University; Adjunct Professor of Mathematics, University of Houston, US
Twitter: @DineshSinghEDU