Five Years of National Education Policy (2020) and the Emergence of a New Natural Intelligence

Emergence of a new natural intelligence among the newer generations is posing a formidable challenge to curriculum, pedagogy and the teaching-learning tools and methods at a pragmatic level.

- DHANANJAY SINGH

The students, wherever they are in the education system, have it in them to create ideas, equations, images, stories, and techniques that go beyond what schools and colleges can teach and train them for.

This phenomenon should not be seen in isolation from what has happened over the last five or six years. There are three events that are significant to consider, and they are quite related—the pandemic, the radical developments in AI and machine learning and the launch of the National Education Policy (2020).

A global health crisis of horrific proportion, the Covid-19 pandemic, with the lockdown and the forced awakening of millions of students to the digital world and its technological webs, infused newer cognitive instruments that is evident in the brilliant contents produced by the young creatives active on social media platforms across the rural-urban divide.

It is quite interesting, but also extremely critical, when retrospectively seen, that within a year of the outbreak of the Covid-19 pandemic, the National Education Policy was launched on 29 July 2020. The world had changed forever. The pre-pandemic world was on a different planet. The pandemic brought a global health emergency like never before that also severely affected the economy, agriculture, culture, logistics, education and other sectors.