Why NEP Implementation Has Been A Failure
Debraj Mookerjee | 15 June 2024 | The Indian Express
The first problem is the NEP’s structure itself. The credit-based eight-semester format seeks to create a standardised interoperable and mobility-based higher education ecosystem, where students can transfer their credits theoretically anywhere. Education is a function of reception and reciprocation, of learning, absorbing, evaluating and responding critically. We are, from a young age, asked to sit down and study. The mind needs to be sthir (steady) to engage in meaningful academic work. The gurukuls of the past created such an environment. The reimagining of higher education as an adjunct to the frenetic demands of an anxious world is to internalise the American view — education as a means to survive in the marketplace, with a huge price attached to it.
As a result of the credit-based system (where the structure determines the content and not vice versa, as it ought to be) syllabi in all disciplines have been stunted. Instead of the five units per paper students were earlier taught in my subject (for example), they are now taught three. Even the chapters prescribed have been truncated in many instances. There is a poem by Walt Whitman named ‘Passage to India’. It has 255 lines across 13 sections. Earlier, we were required to teach the entire poem; under the NEP syllabus, just 68 lines across 4 sections have been prescribed. It is a philosophical poem. It needs to be understood in its entirety. In section 12, Whitman writes “Passage to more than India/ Are thy wings plumed indeed for such far flights?”, thereby asking the West whether it is ready for the wisdom of the East. Is the soul prepared he asks, for the “Sanskrit and the Vedas?” It is exactly these things that are not to be taught to students…