8 months ago
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Eminent historiographer Romila Thapar has powerfully criticised the University Grants Commission (UGC)’s Learning Outcomes-based Curriculum Framework (LOCF), informing that it represents an intrusion into assemblage autonomy and a dilution of world quality.
She besides cautioned that the projected framework, successful its existent form, could hazard reducing higher acquisition into rote learning with students confined to question-and-answer formats, alternatively of being encouraged to rise captious questions.
Prof. Thapar’s critique is portion of Kerala’s ceremonial effect to the Union Education Minister and the UGC. She was peculiar invitee successful the Prabhat Patnaik-chaired adept committee formed by the Kerala State Higher Education Council to survey the draught document.
Draft UGC program puts absorption connected ‘ancient wisdom’
The noted world emphasised the request to entrust universities with the determination connected what is to beryllium taught and researched. “The syllabus and what is to beryllium taught and however successful each subject is the interest of the idiosyncratic assemblage and is not to beryllium dictated to by the government. These are concerns successful which a specialised and precocious cognition is required; thing that evidently administrators and politicians bash not have,” she stated, adding that non-specialists deficiency the precocious and up-to-date cognition that is required to plan effectual curricula.
Referring to the UGC’s attraction of the conception of modernity, Prof. Thapar suggested a much nuanced attack by dividing it into 2 phases. The archetypal signifier indispensable ideally impact the intelligence past of Europe from the 17th period onwards successful debates connected rational thoughts by philosophers, portion the 2nd signifier is further precocious by some the Industrial Revolution and colonialism. Both, she noted, person heavy implications for the economy, societal change, and India’s assemblage experience, and request to beryllium critically studied.
The historiographer besides raises objections to the perceived deficiency of clarity and world rigour surrounding ‘Indian Knowledge System’ successful the UGC draught document. She argues that determination has been nary due explanation oregon analytical model to explicate what constitutes the concept.
Prof. Thapar’s disapproval centres connected the prevalent usage of texts specified arsenic Kautilya’s Arthashastra, often quoted arsenic a typical enactment of past Indian thought. However, she points retired the uncritical mode successful which specified texts are applied crossed immense chronological spans, from 500 BCE to 1000 CE, without considering the changing social, governmental and intelligence contexts that shaped them.
The Indian Knowledge System, she opined, cannot beryllium treated arsenic solely a Hindu contribution. “Even if immoderate of the texts were composed successful Sanskrit, determination was, during the archetypal and aboriginal 2nd millennia AD, a sizeable speech of ideas connected proto-science crossed India, westbound Asia, cardinal Asia and China. These ideas cannot beryllium fixed a geographical bound oregon a spiritual origin,” she asserted.
