John Dayal - Modi and Sangh shape education in their own mould // Pratap Bhanu Mehta: Text of education policy artfully navigates several thickets
The Rashtriya
Swayamsevak Sangh has saved us all a lot of time writing long critiques, with
its admission that the Education Policy the Union Cabinet approved in the
silence of the Covid catastrophe bears its imprint. The Sangh’s several
spokespersons focussed on the mother tongue - a polite phrase to mean the
official language of a state, and not really the tongue spoken at home such as
Maithili in parts of Bihar or Kui, of the Kondhs of Kandhamal - as the medium
of education at the primary level. This was an early climbdown after Tamil Nadu
rejected early attempts to foist Hindi. But the education policy bears the
Sangh stamp much through its dreary path.
It also bears Mr
Modi’s distinct stamp, of course, who wants the Indian mind purged of all the
garbage that Jawaharlal Nehru dreamt for the people of the newly independent
India back in 1947. The vicious attacks in
recent months on the many giants who led the Education Ministry, among them
Maulana Abul Kalam Azad, the preeminent jurist M. C. Chagla, Professor Humayun
Kabir, Dr KL Shrimali, Dr VKRV Rao, and Professor Nurul Hasan, is an indication
of the mindset, if an indication was needed.
One wonders if a
President Kalam would have emerged if his Education Policy was in force when he
was a student. Instead of becoming the redoubtable rocket engineer that he
became because of his single minded determination, he would have perhaps become
a wonderful expert fisheries engineer. All that gentle persuasion to students
to take the easy way to vocations instead of philosophy, economics, literature,
or physics, the subject I love, is even older than the Sangh. Dates back to
Manu. …
https://sabrangindia.in/article/modi-and-sangh-shape-education-their-own-mouldPratap Bhanu Mehta: Text of education policy artfully navigates several thickets
The emphasis in the document on critical
thinking and free inquiry is entirely well placed. But it is difficult to read
those words in a context, where as we speak, universities are being intimidated
into political and cultural conformity. A free education system cannot flourish
without a free society; reason cannot be sovereign in the face of identity
politics. So the work of ensuring that freedom and critical thinking are not
mere words in a power point, constrained by realities of power, will be doubly
harder....
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The Assassination of Mahatma Gandhi: Inquiry Commission Report (1969)
The Abolition of truth
The Assassination of Mahatma Gandhi: Inquiry Commission Report (1969)
The Abolition of truth
