Educational Policies and the New Normal: Multiple Pathways to Exclusion

The mainstreaming of informal modes of education like open and distance learning (ODL), aggressive promotion of online learning as the “new normal”, installation of blended learning/hybrid models of teaching–learning, and the syncing of university syllabi with current demands of the industry-corporate combine are the marked agenda of recent policy shifts. Most of these agendas have found their way into the National Education Policy (NEP) 2020, and are typically justified using the rhetoric of “increased access, equity, and inclusion”. This essay offers a critical examination of the policy provisions that represent the promotion of the ruling elite’s agenda of greater informalization of education to be imparted to the deprived sections of youth, but now also to be steadily imparted within the domain of regular college education that has been the mainstay of more privileged youth. As will be shown, the poor quality of learning imparted through informal modes of education, like distance learning, militates against the popular notion that there are “multiple pathways of learning”—a notion that wrongly presumes that informal education is equivalent to regular, formal mode of education.