Abstract:

“Education is in crisis,” declared the World Development Report 2018. More than 260 million (60 million from India alone) children in the world do not go to school. According to the report, the first to be left outside schools are those already in a vulnerable societal position because of economic status, gender, disability, caste and ethnicity. This paper focuses on how the national or federal education policies regulate the education system in a country and further add to the ongoing global crisis, particularly in India, in comparison with China and the USA.

India is expected to overtake China as the largest country on earth by 2022 and grow to about 1.5 billion people by 2030. It is an acknowledged fact that almost half of India’s 1.2 billion people are under the age of 26 and by 2020 it is forecasted to be the youngest country in the world with a median age of 29. Therefore education is vital here. A 2013 study of 60,000 university graduates in different disciplines found that 47 percent of graduates were unemployable in any skilled occupation. With changing governments and different political agendas the first to be impacted is the education goals of the country. In India we see an emerging nationalistic identity replacing the colonial elitist approach that impacts education policies.

This year for the first time after 72 years of independence from the British colonization, India has declared education as its national agenda and launched the third National Education Policy (NEP). There are many firsts in this Policy. It promotes liberal education where there is no hard separation between the Sciences and Arts. It has recommended breakfast, mid-day meals and free transportation for children to reduce dropouts. It has also recommended restructuring the design of the school curriculum. Once again 6% of national income has been recommended. But the NEP also has a few ideological references instated by political motives, like the need for Hindi to be made a compulsory language across the country by also referring to English as the language of the economic elite, “an unnatural aspiration” (p 82; NEP) and the stress laid on the need for “all stages of school education to heavily incorporate Indian and local traditions” (p 76; NEP).

The paper will track the history of education policies introduced by changing governments since the country's independence in 1947 - Right from policies introduced by the Congress party in the year 1964 to the current Bharatiya Janata Party and its impact on education. Through this comparison, thereby showing how political ideologies influence rules and regulations in education that further impacts pedagogy, curriculum, and assessments in a country. This paper will also draw references from other countries like the US and China with different political ideologies.

Keywords:

Education, political ideologies, politics, policies.