The following note was written, as the first draft of a critique on NEP 2020's proposals on school curriculum, sometime in October-November of last year, as a contribution for an anti-NEP 2020 booklet being brought out by All India Forum for Right to Education (AIFRTE). We are putting up this section on the blog for wider public dissemination since the final publication of the said booklet has been delayed. We acknowledge AIFRTE's and its booklet committee's stimulus for this note and the inputs of the committee members that went into drafting it. This note would not have come into existence without AIFRTE's booklet exercise and organisationally collective intellectual labour. Indeed, to the extent AIFRTE agrees with the analysis in this note, the authorship too may be said to belong to it. We also wish to put it on record that this is not an exact replication of the final section on curriculum which will/does appear in AIFRTE's booklet, as this draft was later edited in order to reduce its length and fit it into the planned size of the booklet.
The curricular structure as envisaged in NEP 2020 is divided into four stages, vis the foundational, preparatory, middle and secondary, but we may identify the following three emphases in the first two, the third and the fourth stages, respectively: foundational literacy and numeracy, 'Indian ethos' and culture (pegged heavily on a distorted study of language) and vocational courses. For the children of Bahujans and working classes, the curricular conception of NEP 2020 stands on two legs, one reducing academic rigour, the other increasing hegemonic indoctrination. Both are interconnected and intended to serve the interests of both the global masters as well as the national rulers.
At one level, the curricular focus of NEP 2020 can be said to be foundational literacy and numeracy and vocationalisation. At another level, there is a consistent and strong emphasis upon 'Indian ethos' and values. In all cases, there is a clear design to centrally control all aspects of curriculum, including textbooks, daily activities, yearly calendars, report cards etc. On the one hand, the policy trespasses dangerously against states' autonomy to organise schools, which is their right and responsibility as per the federal character of the constitution. On the other, it also takes the unprecedented and dictatorial step of intruding into the classroom and professional space by decreeing, all in the name of various centrally-proposed and dictated activities, programs, courses etc, lesson-plans and pedagogy to be adopted by teachers! The overall intent of the curriculum envisaged in the policy is to a) capture and command the curriculum centrally; b) dilute, de-academise and dumbify the content; and c) differentiate and segregate the content unequally between children from different classes. The following is an exemplification of the above-stated critique.
The declaration of curricular objectives is focused on students' becoming 'good, successful, innovative, adaptable, and productive human beings in today's rapidly changing world.' (4.23) This presents the larger changes taking around us as fait accompli to which students must learn to adapt in order to achieve success, which equals goodness. Obviously, there is no place for a transformatory role of education or agency of students and young people in such a curriculum. The prioritisation of fundamental duties over rights (which are conspicuously absent throughout the text) is only a logical corollary of such a curriculum.
The proposal of a National Curricular and Pedagogical Framework for Early Childhood Care and Education (NCPFECCE, 1.3) makes the intention to even control and design pedagogy, something which falls in the domain of higher education institutions and professional and academic bodies, starkly clear. This is a clear attempt to preempt research based, disciplinarian development and practices of pedagogy. That this conception includes 0-3 year-old children hints at the Orwellian designs of total control over child-rearing practices and cultural influences in early childhood. Given the obvious slant of the curriculum, as envisaged in the policy, towards an uncritical and glorificatory conception of 'ancient India' and 'Indian ethos', it is inconceivable that this is a well-intentioned, leave alone an innocent proposal. Apart from this, the proposals for a pre-primary preparatory class and making children school ready as per the logic of foundational literacy and numeracy is a direct encouragement to a sort of coaching for the initial stages of curriculum termed foundational and preparatory. The curricular conception of foundational literacy and numeracy is itself built upon weak grounds and fails to learn any lessons from the discredited NCLB (No Child Left Behind, a standards and target-setting Act promulgated in 2001 in the USA). The targeting of universal FLN standards (by grade 3) by 2025 is an open invitation to disaster as it ignores the invalidity of borrowing an approach from the world of business, industry and corporate offices which is so ill-suited to the complex, humane and engaging world of education (2.2). Such targeting of outcomes is sure to produce distortions like 'teaching to test', manipulation, gaming, exclusion, dilution of content etc. Moreover, the centering of MHRD's (MoE, post policy) role in deciding ECCE curriculum and pedagogy is also patently anti-federal (1,9).
That 'experiential learning' is meant to be used as a Trojan horse to infiltrate biased content and regressive values in the curriculum is clear not only from the contradiction with its stated association with 'learning outcomes' and 'competency-based learning' (4.6) but also from more sincere references to its use 'for imbibing the Indian ethos through integration of Indian art and culture in the teaching and learning process at every level' (4.7). The open call to reduce curriculum (4.5) complements the emphasis on experiential, joyful and activity-based learning. The two together are intended to serve the objective of dumbing down the content and processes of education, which is so essential to the attainment of the next objective, that is to indoctrinate into a hegemonic world-view. The soup of FLN, experiential learning, flexibility, fun-activity etc is, on the one hand, an attack on academic rigour and content standards, and, on the other, a ruse to impose centrally controlled, designed and surveilled curricular programs and classroom processes.
The obvious implications of the particular presentation of the 3-language formula and multilingualism in the policy will be that state-run schools in north India will keep on teaching Hindi, Sanskrit and English; other states may provide their respective languages, English and Hindi/Sanskrit; and elite private schools across the country will offer their students Hindi, Sanskrit and English and/or a Foreign Language. To probe the claims of choice, it must also be asked as to whether students in state-run schools will get a chance to study foreign languages as students of elite private schools do. The policy does not commit to linguistic curricular fairness to students from all sections and schools. A close look at the language part of the curricular design proposed by NEP 2020 provides a clear idea of its biases. While Sanskrit gets independent and repeated attention, other languages, including those accepted as classical, are given short shrift. Thus, while textbooks for Sanskrit will be prepared even for the foundational stages, it will continue to be offered as part of the 3-language formula and included at all levels, no such large-heartedness is shown to any other language. Moreover, while exposure to other languages may take place through digital means, making no such suggestion for Sanskrit alone indicates that actual recruitment in schools will focus on it. All this becomes especially ironical when the policy declares its intent to ensure that these languages, which are actually spoken by millions and have a thriving tradition of literature, 'stay alive and vibrant', without saying a word about the near dead nature of a language which, if at all it survives, does so on rather generous and biased state-support!
NEP 2020 does a huge disservice to the idea of India and her students by the petty-mindedness it brings to the exercise and intent of the proposals. It stoops down to retorting to the infamous slander against Sanskrit by Macaulay, by asserting that Sanskrit 'possesses a classical literature that is greater in volume than that of Latin and Greek put together...(4.17)' Such pettiness is once again evident in excluding, for obvious and non-academic reasons, Chinese/Mandarin and Arabic from the list of curricular foreign languages, which is limited to 3 east Asian and 5 European languages and ignores whole continents. Such a narrow conception is again evident in limiting Knowledge of India (4.27) to 'ancient India', an empty eulogy and unsubstantiated glorification of Indian ethos and languages (4.15, 4.29 etc) which caricatures learning about languages and cultures to memorising stock phrases (4.16). Of course, this shorthand prescription does not apply to Sanskrit! It is ironic that a policy which talks of millenia of development in local ECCE practices skips a whole millenia and more of Indian history as an exercise in blackout or censorship. This selective amnesia with facts and history is a treason against reason and the rights of students and must not be countenanced in a policy on education. This intellectually lazy approach is extended to the matter of values, where not only are 'traditional Indian values' put before Constitutional values but particularistic manners and variedly interpretable cultural practices such as courtesy, patriotism, patience, swachchhata, nishkam karma, sewa, are listed as values to be developed in all students (4.28). Not surprisingly, the constitutional and modern values of justice, liberty, equality and fraternity come last in this listing, almost as an afterthought. In keeping with the strain of narrow-mindedness, it is proclaimed, "All curriculum and pedagogy, from the foundational stage onwards, will be re-designed to be strongly rooted in the Indian and local context and ethos in terms of culture, traditions, heritage, customs...ancient and contemporary knowledge...(4.29)", thereby putting a question mark on the universal elements of education and the research-based disciplinarian elements of pedagogy which are shared across countries. Such a narcissistic approach to curriculum which denies the universal character of certain knowledge systems and belittles the contribution of the rest of the world to knowledge and human values will only lead to narrow-minded and intellectually impoverished young people. Perhaps, that is precisely the intention.
While reading, writing and speaking are unmindfully listed as 'subjects' in reference to the curriculum for the foundational stage (4.2), the leaving out of Environmental Studies as a subject fits in with the reduction of environmental awareness to 'water and resource conservation' (4.23), without any mention of that profit-oriented exploitation of humans and resources inherent in capitalism which is responsible for environmental degradation and climate crisis. Similar obfuscation of reality is reflected when the policy shies away from naming caste, communalism, patriarchy etc for curricular themes. This curricular approach in NEP 2020 is designed to produce a blinkered and ostrich-like mentality among students. As with EVS in the earlier part, science too is conspicuously absent from the focus on later stages of the curriculum. In all, there seems to be no space in the policy's layout of curricular structuring for an engagement with either the objectivity and temper of sciences or the empathy and depth of arts. Almost all the space and attention is occupied by a shallow and distorted conception of language and culture which in turn serve vested interests.
Unmindful of its disastrous implementation in universities and its unsuitability to the social reality of large sections of students, the policy suggests the adoption of a semester system even for schools. This is to be seen with the intent to break down the curriculum into disconnected capsules and distort any meaningful engagement with subject matter and disciplines. What such a disjointed curriculum would readily provide space for is the government's propaganda programs like "Ek Bharat, Shreshtha Bharat initiative" and "Fit India movement" (4.16 and 4.8, respectively). For example, proposals like 'week of language' activity (4.16) are highly likely to be used, as the commands to upload photos and videos of compliance have been showing us, to directly control the daily routine of schools. We have already been seeing how schools have become convenient captive spaces for the government's partisan and propaganda events mandatorily entailing collective oath-taking, runs, live telecasts of PM's speeches etc. NEP 2020 paves the curricular way to cement such anti-education interventions in schools. The hype about giving students the choice to select subjects at the secondary stage is proved hollow by the policy's affirmation that the suggested curricular structure does not require any infrastructural changes. Moreover, nothing in the policy indicates that multiple subject resources and teachers would be made more available than before in order to realise the choices of students. In fact, when the policy actually derides the idea and value of inputs, it is certain that the much touted subject-choice will meet the same result as the 3-language formula, only with starker and wider disparity across different classes of schools. The design of vocational courses, in its reference to ten bagless days, holiday periods, bagless days throughout the year etc, again in the name of experiential learning, is also intended to achieve a hollowing-out of the curriculum.
Board exams present a similar logic. They will be made 'easy' enough for all students 'going to school and making a basic effort .... to pass and do well' (4.37), but segregate students for assessment at two unequal levels in all subjects (4.38). The falsity of the purported logic of reducing stress, increasing flexibility etc for students vis-a-vis the Board exams is immediately proved in the proposal to institute centralised tests for assessing learning outcomes and tracking students at grades 3, 5 and 8 (4.40). All this boils down to a consistent recipe for diluting academic standards and segregating students into unequal tracks. Thus, bodies like PARAKH (NAC) and platforms like SAS and NAS will use 'learning outcomes' to push schools and boards to 'shift their assessment patterns towards meeting the skill requirements of the 21st century in consonance with the stated objectives of this Policy (4.41).' The policy could not have been more upfront about its meaning of the '21st century skills', a term otherwise left elusive and conveniently undefined in the policy. The gloss of '21st century skills' which is being put upon the minimalist and decontextualised
The policy's proposals around school textbooks, always an important part and signifier of curriculum, provide a textbook summary of the whole import of NEP 2020. Their content will be reduced, character will be centralised/nationalised but segregated as per the class background of students and schools and they will not be free (4.31 and 4.32). Indeed, privately published textbooks will be encouraged, in the name of additional material and the new PPP (public-philanthropic partnerships), thereby catering to the needs and demands of elitist private schools, whereas public distribution of textbooks will be discontinued to ease 'logistical burden' and 'conserve the environment' (4.3)! This concern about protecting the environment is unsurprisingly missing in the context of the much more harmful effects of a growing digitalisation and that proliferation of e-devices which this policy itself promotes unabashedly.
There is a special section on 'gifted students with special talents' (4.43 to 4.46) which is telling, especially in the context of no special attention having been paid in NEP 2020 to children from marginalised and deprived sections or children with special needs or the girl child. This special focus also fits in with the larger discourse of 'merit' consistently and aggressively pushed by the policy. This promise of one-sided attention and material support is not only antithetical to the norms of social justice but also goes against the pedagogic responsibility of schools and teachers towards those students who may be struggling academically, mostly for reasons of material, social and cultural capital. Its ramifications are plain to see when we realise that the policy is proposing the minimalism of foundational literacy and numeracy and an intellectually compromised and indoctrinaire education for the masses, and special academic support for the 'meritorious' few.
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