NEP (NATIONAL EDUCATION POLICY)- Change in Educational System

90’s kid who usually take credits in saying, "We belong to the generation who played with toys rather than phones like today's generation", whose parents would remark, "We used to cross rivers to go to the school to study or walked a long distance for education" sarcastically, have now witnessed a great change in education system. Today's generation who were fed up of the examination system and the railroad in which we were built to make a good employee for service than creation, followers than leaders and who considered education being a passage where there was no possibility of track change once chosen a track, has been given a new passage by trying to demolish the erstwhile system of education by the Government of India.

National Education Policy (NEP) has the long waited changes in Education policy, after 34 years. In past, many bills have been passed by the precursory governments by providing options, like percentile system, to ease up the study pressure on students but on ground reality never changed for them.

Following the same trend today’s education policy has also brought a magic bucket for students, which has many good practices and ideas, invested to handle the students' pressure, growth and augment their interest in education.

What is National Education Policy (NEP) reframed and its benefits?

Education Method in new NEP:

The 10 +2 frame of education has been changed to  5+3+3+4 frame, which means now the age groups are being divided as 3-8 years, 8-11 years, 11-14 years, and 14-18 years, so now the new education will have 12 year of schooling along with 3 years of pre-schooling or Anganwadi, as it is the age where the mental growth of child takes place. Earlier this was being practiced by private schools only but now government schools will also follow the same.

NCERT will develop a new community National Curricular and Pedagogical Framework for Early Childhood Care and Education (NCPFECCE), which will handle the education pattern for students up to the age of 8. Adding up it privileges the Schools by providing a choice to usage of local language/ regional language as the medium of information to furnish education to the students till Class 5 and then provides a choice to students to continue with it or not. Sanskrit will also be offered as an optional language to be taught along with the 3-language formula which includes regional, local and English where at least 2 of the language chosen has to be native to India. No language will be imposed on students after Class 5.

Coding and technical education will also be provided to students from Class 6 onwards. They are allowed to learn coding, foreign language and sports which will concluded in equivalent grades. This will decrease the stigma that vocational jobs like driving, carpeting, painting, writing etc are not good career options. In current trend, those carrying out these jobs are not accepted as highly in society but in other countries they are treated equally which is because they learn these skills from school and choose as career options.

Assessment criteria:

No more annual examinations will be conducting in every standard or at the end of every session. Examinations will now be conducted in Class 3, 5 and 8. This will eliminate the concept of mugging up and allow to learn on daily basis. Board examinations for Class 10^th and Class 12^th will be same as followed previously but redesigned by Performance Assessment, Review, and Analysis of Knowledge for Holistic Development  (PARAKH) which will act as a standard-setting structure.

Students will now acquire vocational and innovation learning more and a 10 days without bag policy will be performed in which students do not need to bring their bags and they will learn other innovative works, for instance carpentry, gardening, plumbing, traffic management and much more via some games, and an outdoor learning is being promoted. The daily assessments by the teachers, students' classmate and by students themselves, will decide the overall result of students. It will promote self evaluation and help them to learn how to evaluate themselves in life which is least followed by students in college and in job life.

Equal importance will be given to every subject. Say, someone is good in sports or debates then his grades from the subjects of his interest, can accumulate some score which will help him to achieve an minimum score to pass (holistic teaching), Let's assume one is good in debate but not is sport, he can share some fixed points from debate to sports.

Conceptual clarity, critical thinking and analysis is given more emphasis than memorizing history dates or math formulas in the revised NEP. So mental and professional or in better phrase practical knowledge is given more importance than some subjective bookish knowledge.

Changes in Higher Education System in NEP:

Students' ethos are now been broken, as there will be no specific subjects or restrictions on choosing of subjects for higher education. Students are allowed to choose any subject in any branch, a science student can now learn political science, which is an Arts subject and an Arts student can take a commerce subject. Having a certain number of subjects is mandatory but which subjects to read is students' choice now. Every subject will have their own points and grades.

Choosing your own subject will also be provided as a choice in undergraduate courses and one can also categorize them as minor and major as per one's interest. You can also take a drop from a 4 years degree at any point and can switch to some other branch by taking the certificate and shifting the credits earned in the prior branch to the new branch. Moreover one can also take a gap and then re-continue the degree. This aims to increase the attendance in universities and employability of a student.

100 foreign universities are also given permission to setup their branches in India, to provide the students an exposure to foreign teaching, learning and good scope for foreign studies.

Government is also increasing the investment in Education in the budget by 6% GDP, which is also being discussed by other governments, but it is still not implemented.

These are the plans and promises by the new NEP. It includes many goods changes promised on paper right now and may get implemented by the year 2022. The Utopian visions in the policy are still questionable. New plans which government make and promise does look a fairy school on paper but may not be the truth on ground level, is being feared by many.

Key points of loophole and negative aspects of the new NEP

Effect on children and teacher due to NEP:

Since local/regional language is provided as an medium of information to furnish education in the choice of Schools, and every States want to make their regional language prioritize over Hindi and English, most of the schools will choose regional or local language as the medium. Now, the families who are in jobs which have transfer of places in every 2-3 years or in some particular interval of months like the Navy, Banks, Army, will face a massive difficulty in educating their children as they will be learning in one local language books and then after shifting to another state they will have to learn another local language to be able to read the books and this change in language will be a hindrance to grasp the knowledge.

Coding and other innovative training need a proper qualified teacher who can make the young minds learn these complex things in a simple way.  Currently, in our country, the Government Schools are not even able to provide proper qualified teachers for existing subject, it is an Utopian dream to have professional prepared in such a short time span. If this is not handled properly it will only increase more pressure on student instead of relaxing it.

The cancellation of Annual Examination according to the new NEP, may loosen up the minds of students for studies and lead to less investment of time on studies. Thus, a proper channel of test and evaluation is needed to keep the children in the learning process.

English is not treated as a compulsory medium of information in schools, which in long run may affect the Indian students on global level. India in of the countries where students learn English from schooling age and these learning bears a hand to achieve foreign jobs and opportunities. Therefore, English needs to be emphasized upon in schools.

Loopholes in new NEP:

As children curricular activities is going to increase and for the same new technologies and tier maintenance need funding which will eventually increase the education fee for students, fees which is already going out of budget for medium class families.

They have built an organization which will provide validation to colleges and schools by seeing their preparation. The team will visit the ground and then approve the institution for license but now as it is an faceless intervention they will not visit the intuition and all the approvals will be done by documents which may contain false information on the preparation, which will mushroom many fake and less equipped schools and college.

In accordance to the new policy, all the educational power is being vested to the Center and less power remains with the state board which will eventually infect the institution on ground practice as every state in India has different financial contribution and infrastructure, based on their resource availability they handle their education. But now this will be solely handled by the body who is unaware of the State's preparation and implementation on ground level.

There is no road map of this dream project, they proposed what they are going to do but did not plan how to execute it similar to demonetization (which was no doubt a very good idea but lacked planning) which will impact the result of this project. Education in India and a dream project will remain a dream project and this is where the whole idea fails.

Failure Planning in NEP:

Allowing foreign colleges in India is the idea which was proposed in 2011 by Congress government which was opposed by BJP on account of the fact that it would destroy the integrity of the country and the culture. Foreign institution need more liberty and less intervention of government which is hard to attain in India, and will result in conflict.

Commercialization and privatization will surely come into picture as that is what the new education system of India tries to achieve, providing all power to a single institution (center) which will have a great impact and the ups and downs on country level education system as the government in center will keep changing over time. Thus, change in government will directly impact the education policy all over India now.

Government is planning to invest 6% in GDP since 1968 but with time we are only able to conclude on 3% , so proposing and implementing are two different things. China invest 2.8% in research and higher studies whereas India used to invest 0.6% earlier which now came down to 0.06%, so even though they do provide flexibility in undergraduate at higher schooling but there is no advantage on large scale if it is not nurtured with higher studies.

Summary:

All in all, the government should have a proper blueprint of the plans, and methods to implement it on a long term which will need the change in the mindsets of the teachers, parents and most essentially the students. It needs a preparation period for all of them. Government also need to consider how they are going to make this vision run on mainstream for people of all classes in affordable range.