The government, headed with the aid of Narendra Modi, has been characteristically noisy approximately the new National Education Policy. So it is a bit complicated to discover that Dinesh Singh, the former vice-chancellor of the University of Delhi, has tended to make policies leftist and socialist. Surely even those names are anathema to the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party? Education policies, the professor stated, did not exist for historic Indian universities that the BJP loves to consult and does no longer exist for a number of the famous universities within the West. Policies signal hazards for the pursuit of highbrow excellence. Mr. Singh stated that they need to be both too restrictive or too prescriptive no longer.
Tying down faculties and universities to unique syllabi — the tendency shown by slicing chapters from social science and history textbooks in school, for example — or compelling establishments to move in a prescribed course — as in allowing research on the doctorate stage best on topics of a countrywide hobby — defeats the project of schooling. Learning is about establishing up, exploring, and discovering; without freedom, there can be no excellence. The weight of schooling rules and the imposition of political prejudices thru schooling — as within the removal of English from the syllabus until center school at some stage in Left Front’s rule in West Bengal — motive grave harm to the talents of reasoning and expression, which might be the first indicators of a knowledgeable people.
Allied to this risk of immoderate prescription is the destruction of flexibility. Educational establishments must now not be clones of each other; they ought to be free to increase their core areas of electricity as their conditions and visions demand. Varied, outward-searching surroundings with inputs from institutions with different achievements signal a dynamic highbrow lifestyle. That might no longer handiest be exceptional for Indian students however additionally be attractive for students outdoor.
For this to be possible, our bodies, just like the University Grants Commission, ought to characteristic extra as enablers than regulators, as Mr. Singh has stated. India’s approach to schooling is the firm notion that bureaucrats and politicians recognize best approximately training, not the professionals inside the discipline. Besides, politicians have usually used education as a pleasant path to creating a compliant electorate. They can in no way allow it to go. What needs to be asked is why no one resists them.