The Text Analysis of National Education Policy 2020

Abstract

This paper first briefly introduces the National Education Policy 2020 (NEP) document formulated by the Indian government and the five education theories (traditional academic theory, learner-centred theory, human capital theory, social efficiency theory and social reconstruction theory) in the field of education. Through relevant literature review, five educational theories or ideologies are proven that they cannot be fully applied in pedagogy. As such, this paper proposes a refutation perspective for each educational theory, showing my adequate understanding and critical awareness of education research. After that, these five significant educational theories are used to analyse the NEP contents from pages 1 to 32. Combining my direct observation and thematic coding of NEP text with the focus ideas of five education theories, the final result of this paper illustrates that social efficiency theory is most dominant in NEP; thereby, the Indian government needs to consider how to balance their education ideology. At the end of this work, I show personal consideration regarding the NEP measures that target India’s current focus social issues: Indian educators still must test and justify the rationality and effectiveness of these education policies formulated in NEP by future practices.