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. 

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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-mould

Pratap 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....
https://indianexpress.com/article/opinion/columns/new-education-policy-nep-india-6533163/


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