After the NEP Verdict, Education Is No Longer the Union Govt’s Weapon

Let us not begin with policy. Let us begin with pathology. The student today is not a learner in the true sense of the word. She is a combatant: not in pursuit of knowledge but in flight from meaning; not in dialogue with her world but at war with it – and with herself. Her classroom is a glowing screen. Her community is an algorithm. Her soul, a site of slow implosion. In the absence of real bonds, real questions and real care, she spirals inward: into depression, into anxiety, into violence, into drugs, into suicide. What was once education has now become an abyss – device-bound, atomised, and meaningless.

This is the condition Korean-German philosopher Byung-Chul Han calls the Burnout Society – a world where individuals, freed from external coercion, destroy themselves in the name of freedom, productivity, and optimisation. Students today are not oppressed by a tyrant. They are devoured by a system that demands performance, multitasking, and perpetual availability. The violence is not spectacular – it is silent, internal and self-inflicted. But no less fatal.

Education was once meant to connect: minds to questions, people to each other, and the self to the world. But we have built an educational system that isolates, fragments and exhausts. It has even manufactured war-mongers en masse – individuals trained not in empathy or reflection but in reaction, outrage and conquest. And for that, education is not even necessary. For combat, all you need is the absence of thought and an abundance of instinct. Animals manage it just fine, without a syllabus.

And what of the teacher?

Once a midwife of thought, the teacher too has become a casualty of this silent war. She is no longer a co-creator of joyful learning, no longer a presence that holds space for doubt, confusion and growth. She is now a bureaucrat of survival, haunted by API scores, publication metrics, and the ghost of promotion. Teaching has become a performance. Mentorship has given way to measurable output. She, too, is at war – scrambling for career advancement in a system that no longer rewards care or courage, but only compliance and visibility. Secretly within her innermost recesses, she conflicts with every other teacher, perpetually trying to outsmart others.

The college and the university fare no better. Once imagined as laboratories of dissent, they are now ranked battlefields, engaged in a perpetual war inside a standardised crucible. NAAC scores and NIRF rankings have replaced pedagogical imagination and intellectual risk. Accreditation, grading, MoUs and audits have become ends in themselves. There is no room to think the world anew when the world must be reported in a format. There is no possibility of engaging creatively with local questions when your institutional worth is calibrated by global templates. The university is no longer a sanctuary for the unthinkable. It is a factory for employability.

What emerges from this cascade – from students at war with themselves, to teachers at war with meaning, to institutions at war with creativity – is a world engineered to be permanently at war. A war with difference. A war with dissent. A war with the earth itself. A war with everything.

When pupils stop questioning

The National Education Policy (NEP) 2020 is not the beginning of this crisis. It is merely the policy expression of it – the glossy PDF version of a long-rotting logic. It promises flexibility but delivers fragmentation. It preaches empowerment but enforces submission. Its obsession with “21st-century skills and employability” is not futuristic. It is feudal. Even the chairperson of the NEP drafting committee, K. Kasturirangan, proudly claimed the policy is designed to impart “employability skills like communication, creativity, and problem-solving” while creating a “workforce aligned to the needs of the market.” It wants docile minds in corporate cubicles and obedient bodies in uniform. It wants a nation of performers, not questioners.

And when pupils/people stop questioning, something terrifying happens: they start obeying. And they start believing in anything. Some even believe that India has developed missiles that travel faster than the speed of light. And when a former college teacher – now a TV anchor – proclaims it with theatrical pride on TV, whether out of sheer ignorance or calculated manipulation, feeding an audience already intoxicated by nationalism, it lays bare a deeper crisis, for this is an audience that fails to grasp the difference between a military operation – a strategic, limited action defined by precision – and a war, with all its cataclysmic, existential weight. 

In mistaking the former for the latter, they reveal not just confusion but collapse: of discernment, of proportion, of reality itself. It becomes unmistakably clear that education has not failed because of a lack of knowledge or access to resources, but because we have extinguished curiosity, silenced wonder, and murdered doubt.

Cultivated idiocy

Some even seem to believe that a ballistic missile, armed with a nuclear warhead, can be safely intercepted mid-air, like a cricket ball casually caught by a fielder at the boundary line. That is not patriotism. That’s not just ignorance – that’s cultivated idiocy, a fine art honed over years of relentless, tireless dedication. 

In my childhood, I vividly remember a comic strip from Bobanum Moliyum (“Boban and Moli”) by the legendary Malayalam cartoonist Toms. In one frame, the quintessential idiot of the village – the Panchayat President – is seen reading a newspaper report about a man who has invented a nuclear bomb so powerful that it would destroy the entire globe.

Naturally, the children, Boban and Moli, wonder aloud: “What purpose would such an explosion serve for the inventor himself?” 

The Panchayat President, calm as ever in his foolishness, replies: “Humanity will forever remember him!” 

In Toms’s world, the Panchayat President was a satire – a harmless embodiment of the idiocy of power. But today, it is no longer satire. In our contemporary world, power has internalised the Panchayat President. He is now on prime-time television. He is in charge of policy. He signs MoUs. He speaks of global leadership in quantum warfare. This is what happens when education becomes hollow: the comic becomes a cabinet. And nations applaud.

No longer merely a Panchayat President, he has now become the president of many nations. 

Ironically, this reminds me of a gem from Toms – an almost pure Lacanian moment. In one strip, the Panchayat President tries to admit a madman into a mental hospital. But the madman outwits him, convincing the doctor that the real madman is the president himself. 

Flustered, he tries to assert his sanity: “But I am a Panchayat President!” The doctor nods, calmly: “This is mild. Won’t take much time to cure. The one admitted earlier thinks he’s the President of the USA.”

Lacan would have summed up the whole scene with grave precision: “A madman who thinks he is the American President is no more mad than a Panchayat President who thinks he is a Panchayat President.”

After all, as Lacan said: “The madman is not only a beggar who thinks he is a king, but also a king who thinks he is a king.”

The final product envisaged by the NEP is not a learner, but what Herbert Marcuse once called the one-dimensional man – a being engineered to conform, consume, and comply. Stripped of thought, emptied of contradiction and flattened into function, this student is not a citizen of a complex democracy, but an ideal instrument in a managed spectacle of unity. In the name of seamless governance and electoral efficiency, the same logic that proposes ‘One Nation, One Election’ also dreams of ‘One Mind, One Mission’. The diversity of thought is recorded as distraction; dissent becomes disruption. 

Market-ready machines

NEP 2020 reinforces a vision of education tailored to market utility, integrating vocational training into every institution and reorienting degree programs – especially in engineering, business, and agriculture – to meet industry demand. This shift comes at a cost: the slow erosion of the humanities and critical thought, fields traditionally associated with questioning dominant ideologies and nurturing democratic consciousness. But more insidiously, the policy reframes the very foundation of affirmative action. Where the Indian Constitution foregrounded social and educational backwardness – particularly the structural marginalisation of SCs, STs, and OBCs – NEP 2020 substitutes this with a more neutral, technocratic vocabulary: 'economically weaker sections' and 'socio-economically disadvantaged groups.'

This rhetorical move is not innocent. It flattens centuries of caste-based oppression into a generalised narrative of economic hardship, erasing the specificity of caste as a system of graded inequality. In doing so, NEP paves the way for a meritocratic regime where historical injustice is overshadowed by market-readiness, and affirmative action is diluted under the guise of inclusion. The result is a silent dismantling – not through outright denial, but through definitional drift. Reservation, once a tool for social justice, now risks becoming a casualty of the language of efficiency and employability.

When democracy is reduced to a periodic spectacle every five years and education to an assembly line of employability, the nation no longer needs thinkers – it needs synchronised voters. What emerges is not a republic of ideas, but a machine of obedience: programmable, predictable, performative. The NEP is not a pedagogy of the future – it is a blueprint for a nation where everyone thinks alike, votes alike, learns alike and forgets alike.

The truth is this: we no longer educate our young to become human – we train them to be useful, to perform without pause. Education no longer nurtures becoming; it programs them to be: machines.

In doing so, we have squandered the opportunity to reimagine education for the age of AI. When machines are mastering memory, pattern and logic, we should be teaching what machines cannot: compassion, ambiguity, resistance and relationship. Instead, we are turning our students into worse versions of machines – obedient, anxious, optimised.

In conclusion

History has always belonged to those who refused to be optimised with performative slavishness. 

The most luminous chapters of student life have not come from internships, but insurrections. From the freedom movement to May ’68, from the anti-war protests in American streets to Tiananmen Square, students have never waited for relevance – they have made it. Education at its best does not feed the nation. It disturbs it.

And thinking, when it truly thinks, has always been an act of rebellion.

Galileo challenged the heavens and stood trial.

Giordano Bruno died for imagining an infinite universe.

Einstein taught us that the speed of light is not just a number, but a challenge to our assumptions about time itself.

Gödel, with his incompleteness theorems, reminded us that no system can contain all truths.

These were not mere scholars. They were insurgents of the mind. Some of them paid the price not for ignorance, but for courage.

The NEP sterilises this spirit. It celebrates the student not as a citizen, cultivator, thinker, scientist, mystic, poet or rebel, but as a “resource.” It celebrates the university not as a place of encounter, but as a startup incubator. It celebrates the teacher not as a thinker, but as a facilitator of “learning outcomes.” This is not reform. This is redesign. From below.

But we’ve been here before.

The twentieth century, too, produced its share of soulless war-making machines – ideologies and institutions so efficient in their brutality that even language faltered before them. Chaplin saw it and gave us The Great Dictator as both satire and warning. Those mechanical men – dressed in medals, marching in sync, killing in obedience –  are in their graves now, utterly forgotten, but those who stood against the wars, in courage and in conviction, still speak to us. Gandhi, Russell, Einstein (Russell-Einstein Manifesto), Chaplin, Muhammad Ali: they were called naïve, unpatriotic, even traitorous in their time. But they endure. They still teach. They still disturb. Because they dared to refuse. And in that refusal, they became the greatest of students, and the truest of teachers.

Today, we stand before a similar crossroads.

In a glorious moment of legal sanity, the Supreme Court has reminded us that education lies in the Concurrent List. The Union cannot impose its will unilaterally. This ruling is not just procedural. It is constitutional. It gives states an opening, not just to reject the NEP but to remember what education once was, and what it still can be.

The question before us is not whether we can tweak the NEP.

The question is deeper and more dangerous: can we remember what it means to learn, before we forget what it means to live?

Anilkumar Payyappilly Vijayan is a Professor of English at Government Arts and Science College, Pathiripala, Palakkad. Under the name a/nil, he is the author of  The Absent Color: Poems. A/nil’s book, Is There a Dalit Way of Thinking?, is forthcoming from Navayana.

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