Must follow best works on education from across world: Expert

BENGALURU: Several education experts voiced their opposition to the National Education Policy 2020 (NEP) position papers, which recently came under the spotlight. These papers push Indian concepts in relation to the often-taught Western concepts in schools, making school education India-centric. But these concepts have come under criticism for being poorly thought out.

“Unless we follow the best and highest works done by others in other parts of the world, we cannot grow. In a competitive world, we need to evolve and expand our horizons of knowledge, and we cannot insist that our students restrict their horizon to just India-based experts and expertise,” said Dr KS Rangappa, president of the Forum of Former Vice-Chancellors of Karnataka.

“The issues surrounding the Pythagoras theorem and other Western concepts have never been questioned. Now, they’re being questioned. It’s being done with no proof and only on the evidence of oral tradition. They must take the opinions of science experts on issues like these,” Niranjan Aradhya, an education specialist, said.

A particularly big change proposed is a multilingual system of teaching with Kannada taught at all levels of schooling as well as importance given to local languages and mother tongues as proposed in the ‘Language Education’ position paper. “A lot of clarification is needed for language imposition. Even with Kannada, there are many dialects. Whatever language taught in schools must be textual that you can write textbooks in and not oral languages.

When they mention home languages, mother tongues, local languages, what do they mean?” said Dr B R Gopal, a retired principal and education professor at MES Teachers’ College. Prof Hemanth Kumar, V-C of Mysuru University and a member of a Committee in UGC on “implementing Indian Knowledge System in our education system”, said, “In our committee, we propose to create awareness among students on the Indian knowledge system. But information on experts and their contributions from other countries should not be discarded.”