As states roll out NEP, address its twin deficits
As states begin rolling out the 2020 National Education Policy (NEP), they need to engage with two important issues that NEP did not address. One, Muslims, India’s most educationally disadvantaged group, were not mentioned in the 2020 NEP. Two, the use of English merited only a few lines of scant attention, despite the massive bottom-up demand for English skills.
Muslims comprise about 15% of India’s population, and are among the most economically, socially and politically disadvantaged groups in India. What makes their omission even more striking in the 2020 NEP is that their education participation rates in schools and colleges are the lowest in India, more so than even Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes. However, while Dalits and tribals were highlighted in the 2020 NEP as requiring special attention, as indeed they should be, Muslims were not.
Among other reasons, this omission does not bode well for achieving one of the main goals of the 2020 NEP — that all Indian students should receive 15 years of quality school education. Without special attention to vulnerable groups, especially Muslims, achieving this goal even by the end of this century will be impossible.
In the case of English, the 2020 NEP avoided discussing the English-medium schooling tsunami in India, where both government and private schools are increasingly teaching all school subjects in English. More importantly, it failed to address why improving the teaching and learning of English as a subject in government regional-medium schools needs to be prioritised, and did not articulate what pedagogical initiatives are required.
With new employment opportunities that reward English skills, the importance of English-medium education has increased significantly in the last three decades. Earlier restricted to upper and middle classes, poor and disadvantaged groups have been at the forefront of the new and unprecedented demand for English-medium schooling. This resulted in low-fee, English-medium private schools mushrooming in India’s villages and towns.
To stem the unabated migration of the poor from regional-medium government schools to private low-cost English-medium alternatives, all government schools in Kashmir,
Nagaland and Andhra Pradesh have either begun, or will soon start, teaching all subjects in English. Other states are selectively expanding such English-medium government schools. Now more than 20% of all Indian students, which comes to roughly 50 million students, are attending low-cost private and government English-medium schools.
The tragic irony is that several studies, including an NCERT report, indicate that the vast majority of students, mostly from poorand lower-middle class families, acquire very limited English skills in these schools. This is principally because their teachers’ own knowledge of English was significantly substandard too. The standards of teaching and learning in regional-medium government schools, where English is taught as a subject in most states from Class 1 onwards, are equally depressing.
Nearly all schools in countries where English is not the main language teach in their own languages. Similarly, reinforcing previous policy recommendations, the 2020 NEP correctly advocated the teaching of all school subjects in the mother tongue and regional language. What it failed to highlight was that if regional-medium government schools had to survive, let alone flourish, the teaching of English as a subject had to be improved significantly. The alternative is the continued precipitous decline in government school enrolment and the recent spectacular rise of private schools, as highlighted in the recent Central Square Foundation report on private schooling.
Therefore, in the rollout of the 2020 NEP by states, an important focus of educational reforms should be the teaching of English as a subject in regional-medium government schools, still attended by the majority of Indian students. The top priority should be to ensure that their English teachers have a basic command over English and know how to teach it.
A sustainable solution to declining enrolment in regional-medium government schools is improving their quality of teaching and learning in all subjects in general, and the standards of English in particular, and not expanding English-medium instruction, as is currently practised by all states. It may be desirable to curtail English-medium schooling, but politically unfeasible given the enormous public demand.
However, states such as Uttar Pradesh should, at the very least, reverse their retrograde decision to convert existing government preschool centres, teaching in local languages and Hindi, to kindergarten classes conducted in English. The guaranteed outcome of such an early start is not better English, but the stifling of children’s language skills, foundational development and creativity.
States must, thus, comprehensively address both the glaring omissions of NEP — pay special attention to provide all Muslim students with 15 years of quality school education and strengthen the standards of English in regional-medium schools. Both are critical to any agenda for transformational educational reform.