Now, 'How to Think'

Prime Minister Narendra Modi on Friday said that the new National Education Policy (NEP) will change the focus from 'What to Think' to 'How to Think'. If the PM really means what he has said, then India is definitely making a major shift in the education policy. According to what Modi has said, generations of students in independent India have grown up and passed out by being made 'What to Think', thus leading to a situation in which people have apparently lost the basic track of 'How to Think', which was a cornerstone of Indian philosophy since the Vedic era. It is with this conviction that Modi has said that the National Education Policy is all set to lay the foundation of new India of 21st century where the stress will be on how to make young minds think. Children go to school with an eagerness to learn, which ideally should also cover learning to think. While Gandhiji had envisaged schools as centres where children learn the basics and then would learn to identify problems and develop novel responses to them, the very mechanism of teaching has been rendered practically useless by successive governments, be it at the Centre, or in the states. Ideally, every teacher, irrespective of whether he or she is teaching at a primary school or at a university, should undergo training in basic skills of teaching and thinking. But a random test will reveal that while majority of school teachers cannot write a leave application even in their respective mother tongue, a sizeable chunk of college and university teachers can neither write or speak correctly in English now in their respective mother tongues. About teaching skill, less said the better. Persons who had passed their High School board exam in the second or third division after a couple of attempts also get employed as primary school teachers. Persons with first class degrees from universities in some states notorious for giving high scores to below-mediocre students are teaching in colleges across Assam, many of whom also have doctorate degrees which can be bought from some private universities in Rajasthan, Madhya Pradesh, UP, Delhi and even in Meghalaya. Most of them will probably disappear if asked to analyse what the PM is talking about.