Why NEP 2020 may be undermining real learning in universities

The Hindu

2 days ago

Under the aegis of the National Education Policy (NEP), higher education in India is undergoing a not-so-silent makeover. The gap between the language of the policy and the language of implementation is a curious case in itself. On paper, the NEP champions interdisciplinarity, flexibility, and employability, appealing terms that resonate with global trends in 21st-century learning. But beneath this progressive surface lies a quiet but concerning transformation. Peel back the glossy brochure of 21st-century learning models and you can see the deeper shift: knowledge is being rebranded as content, students as clients, and professors as PR managers with PhDs.
This is not an isolated Indian phenomenon. It mirrors global neoliberal shifts in education, where accountability frameworks, performance indicators, and employability metrics have supplanted older ideals of intellectual growth and moral inquiry. While it is positive in many ways compared to previous models, there are many pertinent issues at stake.
By and large, the NEP reduces learning to feedback forms and grade or ranking inflation, neglecting the discomfort, struggle, and growth that any true education or learning experience demands. In such a set-up, the emotional labour of learning and teaching is often invisible, and care, once central to pedagogical ethics, becomes conditional, performative, and ultimately disposable.
Infantilisation of the learner in the name of compassion
Gone is the intellectual messiness. In its place? Smiles, satisfaction surveys, and syllabi stripped of all sharp edges. Welcome to the age of the student-as-customer and the professor-as-service provider.
Please rate your classroom experience out of five stars. Forget rigorous inquiry! What we are getting is TEDx vibes, where the classroom becomes a performance stage. The teacher, a facilitator of good vibes. And the curriculum? A catalogue curated to avoid friction with dominant ideological comfort zones. Step into many universities today, and you will find a new decorum: slick, sanitised, and suspiciously soothing.
This customer-service approach does not empower students; it diminishes them. It flattens the rich, messy, and often contradictory nature of adult learning, also known as andragogy, into bite-sized, easily consumable pieces. Education is no longer about transformation. It is about satisfaction. Instead of creating a real-world engagement and understanding, the priority of today's classroom is often to collect data, test scores, feedback ratings, and student numbers. Students are expected to absorb content quickly and feel good about it.
The professor who challenges the existing status quo? Too 'negative'. The one who coaxes students through moral dilemmas and historical injustices? Too 'intense'. The one who smiles, nods, and soothes everyone's nerves? Promotion material. Therefore, better stick to dopamine-delivering videos and easily digestible content, lest we cause emotional distress to adult learners.
The point is not that mental health does not matter (it absolutely does), but there is a difference between care and coddling. Take the example of a student who found an assigned reading 'anxiety-inducing.' The response? Remove the text. Modify the syllabus. Minimise discomfort.
But real learning is not always about keeping the learners comfortable. Sometimes, the learning process is slow, messy, and challenging.
The change in the learning environment is a historical process, too. During the Enlightenment in Europe, the focus shifted to knowledge based on reason, science, and logic. Apparently, this brought many benefits - technology, medicine, progress - but at the cost of instrumentalising human life, treating knowledge more like something to use than something to live by.
The rise of the scientific method, instrumental reason, and the resultant industrial capitalism reoriented knowledge toward control, prediction, and productivity. By the 20th century, this changed even more. With the rise of computers, the internet, and mass communication, we started thinking in terms of information: bits, bytes, messages. And now, in the 21st century, we have gone one step further. We live in a world driven by data: numbers, statistics, clicks, and algorithms. We want fast answers, predictions, and performance. What is celebrated here is a smart society with the smartphone revolution.
The cult of niceness
Nice. Pleasant. Approachable. These are now the gold standards for educators — not insight, not rigour, not moral courage. Classrooms are conceived as therapy sessions. But the point is that supporting student well-being does not necessarily mean abandoning academic rigour altogether.
Diverse backgrounds and needs of the learner matter. The idea is not to ignore the diverse needs of the learners. That is where trauma-informed teaching becomes significant. But what we are witnessing as the outcome of the NEP model is something different: the manipulation of needs to the demand for a stagnant comfort zone and the pathologising of effort itself. While learners' autonomy matters, academic tasks should not be confused with emotional harm. It is important to make learners believe that they are capable of facing the world's intellectual and moral difficulties, not just their own emotions.
Take this real-life example: A professor asks students to read some materials. A student complains: 'This kind of dense critical writing makes me anxious.' Instead of opening a conversation about discomfort as part of growth, the institution urges the professor to revise the syllabus. Less confrontation, more comfort. Professors are advised to avoid 'heavy' topics. Course content is 'curated' for maximum comfort. The classroom space is increasingly being treated as a wellness lounge.
Under the NEP's data-driven metrics and performance audits, care is reduced to optics. Students are not asked to think, only to feel good. Assignments are now 'triggering'. Reading is 'stressful'. This is not a question of being a compassionate teacher. It's about infantilising the learner. This ideology of infantilising the learner is not an accidental phenomenon. The worst hit is the humanities, long held to be the conscience of the academy, which is being asked to justify itself in the language of numbers. Research must be 'measurable', impact must be 'visible', and thinking must be 'productive'.
The overpsychologisation of learning and the erosion of andragogy
Even in classrooms where the humanities and liberal arts are the focus, a disturbing trend has taken hold — the overpsychologisation of learning. The language of therapy has replaced the language of inquiry in classrooms. Lengthy readings are 'overwhelming'. Assignments are 'too stressful.' Critical thinking is 'too much.' This is not adult learning (andragogy). This is emotional event management.
The very concept of adult intellectual autonomy, central to higher education, is under threat. Andragogy, the philosophy of adult learning based on autonomy, critical engagement, and the integration of lived experience, withers away in such a fragile environment. Care ethics, too, suffers. Once a cornerstone of meaningful education, rooted in responsiveness and responsibility, care is now instrumentalised: reduced to keeping students satisfied rather than helping them grapple with the moral and ethical ambiguities of the real world.
Real care, the kind Nel Noddings talks about, is not the same as customer service. It's not saying 'yes' to everything, or making sure everyone leaves happy. It's holding the learners accountable. It's saying: I believe in your potential enough to challenge you.
Care ethics, as developed by thinkers like Nel Noddings, calls for a relational, responsive, and context-sensitive engagement with students. It insists that education is not merely about outcomes, but about nurturing the person, fostering critical thought, and supporting the learner's moral and intellectual development. Yet, within the customer model, care is instrumentalised: empathy becomes a means to better ratings, and dialogue is reduced to diplomacy.
The trickiest aspect of this shift is its quantification. Under the NEP's 'measurable impact' model, every element of education must be counted, tracked, and assessed. Research must be output-driven. Learning outcomes must be visible and monetizable. Pedagogical success must be feedback-certified. This trend reflects a deeper shift in the educational imagination. Learning is no longer framed as a broader struggle, as engagement with something larger than the self, but as an emotional event that must be carefully curated to avoid inner disturbance.
Challenging the new status quo
The NEP model is programmed to produce emotionally affirmed customers instead of intelligent learners. To resist this is not to be cruel. It is to take students seriously. It is to believe they are capable of facing the world's intellectual and moral difficulties, not just their own emotions. It is to reclaim the classroom as a space not of avoidance, but of transformation. It is to fight for a model of education that honours the learner, not the customer; that cultivates understanding, not just consumption. It's about resisting the soft tyranny of customer satisfaction forms and standing up for difficult conversations, slow reading, critical thinking, and moral inquiry.
For students: You deserve more than just pleasing classrooms and comfort zones. You deserve challenge, contradiction, artistic encounters and the dignity of struggle, one that brings out the best versions of your potential. For professors: Your role cannot be reduced to classroom therapists or a PR agent well-tuned to the demands of corporate psychology. You have got much difficult task in these challenging times. Let us not surrender thoughtful rigour for ratings. For administrators: If we sanitise classrooms of discomfort, we do not produce adult learners or resilient citizens -we churn out fragile consumers.
To rescue and relive the idea of the university, which has become a data-generation site, is a collective responsibility. The classroom is also a vibrant space for asking difficult questions about human meaning, morality, and collective futures, as it is now governed by dashboards, learning outcomes, and data-pooling and analytics. Where knowledge has been flattened into metrics, learning is just a performance. And the student is trained not to think, but to respond as a node in a feedback system. This is not simply a change in method; it is a change in what kind of humans our education system is designed to produce. If we give up everything for the data to decide, and if we do not push back now, loudly, messily, courageously, we are going to miss the classroom not just as a place of learning, but as a space of deeper questions of democracy.
(Dr. Sudeesh K serves as an Assistant Professor in the Department of English and Cultural Studies at CHRIST (Deemed to be University), Yeshwanthpur Campus, Bangalore. The views expressed herein are his own.)