To drum up support for their protest against implementation of the National Education Policy (NEP) - 2020 and other initiatives being introduced by the State government in the education sector as part of reforms, leaders of Pathasala Parirakshana Vedika (Forum for School Protection) are organising a State-level education conference on July 17.
At a press conference on Saturday, the State leaders of the forum said NEP was being implemented in an “undemocratic” way without taking into confidence the stakeholders.
The merger of anganwadis and Classes 3 to 5 in the primary schools with the high schools would not augur well for the students, especially girl students, and those in the rural areas, as most of them would drop out of school due to increased distance between their home and school.
‘Discriminatory’
They said education should be a tool that bridges the social, economic and gender gap. But some components of the NEP would contribute to the widening of this gap. They said when the country was in a lockdown mode and an unprecedented number of people fell prey to the COVID-19 virus, the government “stealthily” brought in NEP without holding any discussions on it. Implementation of this “discriminatory” policy would further add to existing number of nearly 2 crore out-of-school children, they said.
The leaders said though Education Minister Botcha Satyanarayana had officially announced that not a single school would be closed down, the policies being adopted by the government was bound to result in closure of thousands of schools. Implementation of the school-merger policy would drastically reduce the number of the existing teacher posts, they said.
‘Quality will suffer’
They said quality of education would suffer due to shortage of the teaching staff. Contrary to the NEP-2020 that endorses mother tongue as the medium of instruction in schools till Class 8, the State government had instructed the department to implement only English as a medium of instruction till Class 8, depriving the children of education in their mother tongue, they said.
They said the July 17 meeting would discuss threadbare the key issues confronting the education sector and try to find a way forward. The meeting would be attended by MLC V. Balasubramanyam from the Progressive Democratic Front, educationists Ramesh Patnaik and Srinivasan and other MLCs.
