What’s in It for School Education?

The Draft National Education Policy, 2019 is silent on the role of the state in providing equality of opportunity in and through access to school education. It has fallen into the trap of measuring outcomes while remaining indifferent to input shortcomings and systemic inequalities.

The author is grateful to the anonymous reviewer for comments that enabled her to clarify and sharpen her arguments.

The proposals for school education in the new Draft National Education Policy, 2019 (DNEP) mainly emphasise building foundational skills like literacy and numeracy, and addressing the prevailing “severe learning crisis.” This emphasis, however, is in keeping with the “outcome orientation” underlying educational policy initiatives since neoliberalisation of education post 1991.

There is no gainsaying that schooling must aim at the development of a “solid foundation in reading, writing, speaking, counting, arithmetic, mathematical and logical thinking, problem-solving” (p 56 of the DNEP). The emphasis upon literacy, numeracy, and reasoning is duly merited. The “severe learning crisis” in schools also has already been centre stage as an annual winter swan song when the Annual Status of Education Report and the National Achievement Survey get released by Pratham and the National Council of Educational Research and Training respectively.