Radical reforms needed
We all are aware about the importance of NEP 2020. The national policy on education is not only a significant step towards transforming India’s education system, with the potential to promote economic growth but is also aimed at enhancing global competitiveness and improving learning outcomes.
The document is therefore, a landmark policy aimed at transforming India’s education system by ensuring equitable and inclusive education for all, with a focus on disadvantaged groups and enhancing the quality of education, with an emphasis on critical thinking, creativity, and problem-solving skills.
The move to adopt the NEP 2020 was felt after various gaps in learning outcomes were noticed in the previous education patter and systems. Though lot needs to be done to achieve a visible change in the education system we can stiil say that at least a beginning has been made.
We need to ascertain the lacunae of the previous system that prevailed and get our act together to achieve some milestones so that the learning outcome among the students is enhanced and brought to perfection.
Just few months back the Performance Assessment, Review and Analysis of Knowledge for Holistic Development (PARAKH) Rashtriya Sarvekshan, formerly known as the National Achievement Survey (NAS), was conducted covering 21,15,022 students from both government and private schools in Grades 3, 6 and 9, across 74,229 schools in 781 districts, spanning 36 states and Union Territories.
The survey found that only 55 per cent of Class 3 students can arrange numbers up to 99 in ascending or descending order while only 53 per cent of them in Class 6 know tables up to 10, a Ministry of Education (MoE) survey has found.
According to the report, only 55 per cent of students in Class 3 can arrange numbers up to 99 in ascending or descending order while 58 per cent of the students can perform addition and subtraction of two-digit numbers.
In Class 6, only 53 per cent of students understand and visualise arithmetic operations and the relationships among them, know addition and multiplication tables at least up to 10 and apply the four basic operations on whole numbers to solve daily life problems.
In Class 6, an additional subject ‘The World Around Us’, which covers environment and society, was introduced alongside Language and Mathematics. Students scored lowest in Mathematics (46 per cent), while Language averaged 57 per cent and The World Around Us scored 49 per cent nationally.
Experts suggest that instances where less than 50 per cent of students were able to answer correctly indicate learning gaps.
These learning gaps highlight the need for focused interventions to strengthen students’ skills, refine instructional strategies, and provide additional learning support.
Notably, the survey points out that State government and government-aided schools recorded similar outcomes, with the lowest performance observed in Mathematics. Language was the highest-scoring subject for all school types, while Mathematics consistently remained the weakest.
The findings of the survey have once again proven a point that education system needs a radical and a massive overhaul so that the efforts spent on the sector bring positive results as we are dealing with the future generations of the nation. We cannot let the sector be ignored at any cost. The NEP 2020 provides a solution to most of the problems that the education sector is faced with.
