The National Education Policy (NEP) 2020 has come out at a time of unprecedented attack on education by the Union government, said Mary E. John, former faculty director of the Centre for Women’s Development Studies.
She was speaking at a plenary on ‘Gender and education in India: disparities and inclusion’ at the 17th national conference of the Indian Association for Women’s Studies under way at Government College for Women, Vazhuthacaud, here on Saturday.
Prof. John said education was considered one of the most important sites for creating hegemony for new agendas. Also, it had not received its due from the women’s movement. This was a huge loss as education, especially higher education, was one of the few sectors where there had been unprecedented expansion in terms of entry of women. In 1950, only 10% of the one lakh students in higher education in the country were women. As per the latest figures from the All India Survey of Higher Education, the number of women in higher education was 37 million. Moreover, it had doubled in the past two decades. This had happened at a time when the State support to higher education has come down.
The NEP talked of integration but had a highly differentiated approach with different streams at different levels, entry and exit options, ‘vocationalisation,’ open learning, and so on. These differences would have consequences, for the question was who would be a part of this and who all would be forced to stay away such as the socially and economically disadvantaged groups, women, and so on.
Anita Rampal, former faculty member of the Department of Education, University of Delhi, said a huge exercise was on to bring out voluminous documents such as the National Education Policy or the National Curriculum Framework. The team entrusted with the NCF had no experience with curricula, while the National Council of Educational Research and Training (NCERT) director was only assisting it. All of this was happening by design. School education, especially secondary education, was aligning itself with the precarity of a gig economy. Public education was getting dismantled, both higher and school education, and those who were not within it could seek their own universities or institutions, added Ms. Rampal .
Looking at NCF, a strong hierarchy of knowledge vs skills was coming in. There was talk of exposing children to vocational education as early as middle school. Little-heard terms such as pre-vocational capacities were being used. This was when the notion of vocational education the way it was had been opposed because of courses that had no educational component and had been designed to cater to the industry. The entire language of NEP and NCF was opposed to the understanding of someone working in education or curriculum pedagogy would have, she said.
P.B. Prince Gajendra Babu, general secretary, State Platform for Common School System, Tamil Nadu; Amita Kumari of the Department of History, Sido Kanhu Murmu University, Dumka, Jharkhand; and Sapna Kedia, International Centre for Research on Women, spoke at the plenary chaired by Kumkum Roy, former faculty member of the Centre for Historical Studies, Jawaharlal Nehru University.
