India’s New Education Policy Is Massively Disruptive And Transformational

But its efficacy would depend on timely and proper implementation

Photo by Scott Graham on Unsplash

India just updated its Education Policy after three and a half decades. And the changes proposed sound amazing on paper.

The current Education system leaves a lot to be desired, including, but not limited to:

• What is being taught: Everything. Without any thought about its relevance to the job industry. An outdated curriculum. And an inflexible one. “Read this”. “And this too”. “No, you don’t get to choose your subjects, not at least till the last 2 years of your schooling”.
• How it is being taught: “Take notes, kids”. “Copy everything that is there on the board”. “Reproduce it verbatim in the examinations to get full credit”. 90% of the ‘teaching’ happens in closed classrooms where all students face the teacher who delivers hour-long monologues.
• The dangerous obsession with scores, grades, and benchmarks: There’s the class topper. And then 2 more kids in the top 3. That is what you should strive for. To be the ‘best’ among 50 other kids. To outscore your classmates. To mindlessly memorize facts and figures and solve questions in the books because the same would appear, verbatim, in the examinations. (Because…