How NEP 2020 is shaping real-world readiness
By laying emphasis on experiential learning through internships, the National Education Policy (NEP) 2020 has introduced a transformative approach to education in India. The policy aims to prepare students for real-world challenges, address skill gaps, and align education with industry demands by integrating vocational training with academic curricula. NEP 2020 envisions a seamless integration of vocational and academic streams, ensuring that every student gains exposure to at least one vocation during their schooling years. This approach eliminates the traditional divide between theoretical and practical education, fostering a multidisciplinary learning environment. The National Education Policy (NEP) 2020 aims to increase the Gross Enrollment Ratio (GER) in higher education, including vocational education, from 26.3% in 2018 to 50% by 2035.
The role of internships in school education
Pre-Vocational Exposure
Internships introduce students to a variety of vocations by giving them an opportunity to have hands-on learning experience in the choice of their field. Whether it's shadowing professionals, participating in field visits, or engaging in industry-led workshops, this exposure deepens their understanding of how businesses and industries operate and helps them make informed career choices. It serves as a training ground for what's in store in the future.
Enhancing Employability
By engaging with real-world challenges, students gain valuable insights and skills, such as critical thinking and adaptability, that are not just an added advantage but a necessity to thrive in their careers. Moreover, for many students, internships serve as a platform for exploring different career paths and gaining insight into various industries. By interning in different roles or organizations, students can gain insight into their interests, strengths and weaknesses. The self-awareness gained steers them in the desired direction.
Bridging the Skill Gap
India faces a significant disconnect between academic instruction and industry demands. The Economic Survey 2024–25 reveals a stark reality, only 8.25% of graduates secure jobs that align with their qualifications, while over 53% face underemployment. This highlights a serious mismatch between the skills imparted through education and the demands of the job market. Early exposure to practical learning through internships helps address this gap by aligning education with evolving industry needs.
Networking Opportunities
Internships also provide students with networking opportunities that can be instrumental in their career development. Interns have the chance to interact with professionals within their chosen industry, connect with fellow interns, and build relationships with mentors and supervisors. These connections can lead to mentorship opportunities, job referrals, and valuable insights into industry trends and job market dynamics.
Skill Development
Internships present a rich platform for skill development and resume enhancement. Engaging in tasks aligned with one's field of interest, interns acquire practical experience, honing essential competencies crucial for professional success. By demonstrating initiative, adaptability, and self-reliance in completing assigned projects remotely, interns showcase their readiness to thrive in diverse work environments. These experiences not only deepen their expertise but also instill confidence in tackling real-world challenges preparing them for what lies ahead.
Challenges to be Addressed
However, for the internship model to be integrated effectively there are certain challenges that need to be addressed. There are resource constraints for one that need attention as many schools lack infrastructure and partnerships with industries to offer meaningful internship opportunities. Regulatory gaps that exist in the absence of clear guidelines on remuneration and working conditions also need to be bridged successfully. Moreover, socio-economic barriers need to be factored in as many students from low-income families may struggle to afford internships in metropolitan areas due to high living costs. The answer to these challenges might lie in adopting measures like - collaboration between educational institutions and industries, financial assistance and policy incentives from the government and monitoring mechanisms to ensure fair treatment of interns and standardize evaluation criteria.
The Road Ahead
The aforementioned points highlight the fact that Internships for school students under NEP 2020 represent a forward-thinking approach that prepares learners for the challenges of the modern world while promoting holistic development. By fostering collaboration between academia and industry, the internship model creates a talent pipeline aligned with evolving market needs. With time, s more schools adopt this model, students will gain the skills and confidence needed to excel in a competitive global environment.
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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. 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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.)
