Designing a modern, progressive and equitable education system

I have always believed that education equality is the cornerstone of a country’s development, more so in a country like India beset by many debilitating social-economic disparities. In my view, what has held us back is our failure to create a modern, progressive, and equitable education system.

The National Education Policy (NEP) 2020 prescribes some radical changes in the country’s education system — a system where every child gets access to quality education, where children are not made to mindlessly memorise facts and formulas, but are allowed to learn from experience and experiments, where teachers promote open discussions over unilateral instructions; one which has a child-centric pedagogy to promote analytical thinking among children rather than one that follows a rigid curriculum and assessment process.

However, some ask why do we need a modern, progressive, and equitable education system when the old system has delivered Global thought leaders and CEOs who are the best in the world today?

The world has changed and so should we. Our current school education system has been a relic of the industrial age — a linear system based on one-size-fits-all approach, a system that has promoted rote learning, static knowledge, and a very skewed sense of ‘merit’, with no encouragement for those who want to pursue their passion, or want to find themselves, not just a job thus creating skilled workers who could fit into the system the way cogs do in a wheel.

With the advent of digital age things changed. You do not need to study knowledge you could search it on-demand. With knowledge becoming a commodity, we need to shift away from industrial age education to digital-age “modern education” that teaches skills to think, apply and innovate rather than learn and vomit.

There is one more big change. As computing power multiplied and got into small handheld devices the thinking process saw a change where artificial intelligence is anticipating what you need before you know you need it. Thus, we are fast-moving from responding to a need to anticipating the need. This needs progressive thinking where we merge arts and science and humanities and create a “progressive education” system that is not a hostage of streams but relevant for skills we will need tomorrow-understanding and anticipating. Interestingly, the new national policy seeks to remove rigid demarcation between arts and sciences, vocational and academic streams, in a way customising the education, giving every child a chance to choose subjects in which she can excel.

However, none of this would matter unless education is equitable. Education is a fundamental right despite a few profiteers trying ways to profit from it. Imagine the state of our country if we had allowed private enterprises to profit from water. For a country of a billion plus people where 144 million children are studying in ill-equipped government schools, we need to ensure that quality education is available to everyone for free. I am pro-business and believe in entrepreneurship; however, not at the cost of creating a divide between the have and have-nots. Education is too fundamental a right for us to hide behind an excuse that the government does not have funds or ideas. We need to create private public partnerships to ensure no child is left behind.

The new Education Policy is a breath of fresh air in its vision of delivering a modern, progressive, and equitable education system that sets each and every child up for life, and not just for a job. Now we must work together to make that vision a reality.