The Kerala model school curriculum and the anxiety of reform

Issues of gender and secularism are key to Kerala’s aspirations — civil society must prevent its public education from being the target of a neoconservative backlash.

Kerala is gearing up to offer a viable alternative to the National Education Policy (NEP) 2020 in its school curriculum framework. While keeping within the NEP’s pedagogical and curricular restructuring paradigms and proposals for school education, the State nevertheless seems to be aspiring for a ‘Kerala Model’ of school curriculum, one that would resist overarching attempts at homogenisation and centralisation. It aims to write regional and ethnic needs, knowledges and histories into the curriculum, while attempting to preserve the constitutional, moral, and ethical values of an equitable public education in the age of neoliberalisation.

Explained | Has Kerala changed its stance on the NEP? 

The NITI Aayog SDG Report 2021 has described Kerala, a State consistently ranked highest in the country in school education, as a “frontrunner” State. The NEP 2020’s school education vision of universal provisioning of quality early childhood development, care, and education has been achieved by Kerala many years back. The State had last revised its school curriculum in 2013, and much water has flowed under the bridge since, especially given the paradigm shifts vis-a-vis the global education scenario during the COVID-19 pandemic. 

Therefore, there is a recognition that school curricular reform, its modalities, evaluation patterns, pedagogical practices, as also its philosophical and ideological imperatives should be the result of social interventions and debates. This could help incorporate the strengths of the current model while envisioning a secure future in the new knowledge economy, and simultaneously pushing for a democratic curriculum rather than one imposed from elsewhere.

The NEP has been criticised by Left-oriented teacher groups in Kerala for its perceived elitism, communalisation of education, excess commercialisation and privatisation. An ever-vigilant civil society in Kerala has zeroed in on the NEP’s perceived silence on constitutional aspirations around secularism, as also around policies of reservation that seek to right historical atrocities and inequalities that the caste system had inflicted upon the nation’s subaltern populations. Many, including Kerala’s Minister for Higher Education, have pointed out that the NEP does not have sufficient focus on gender and minority rights, and regional, cultural and linguistic differences. 

What is of critical importance is that education, with its present concurrent status in India from the time of the Emergency, has become a key aspect in compelling debates around federalism and the rights of States. While Kerala’s curricular reform move is in complete conformity with the NEP’s parameters, it is nevertheless a brave attempt at addressing its perceived lacunae and blind spots, with more democratic interventions woven around  people’s investments and aspirations in public education. A school curriculum reform that incorporates the suggestions and inputs of both experts and stakeholders, debated and discussed at various tiers including the district, block and panchayat levels, with an open-tech platform for direct responses from any committed citizen, seems a participative and democratic model par excellence — in fact, this model can be a template for other States in the country. 

A reform implementation strategy that facilitates people’s mass participation along with educational practitioners’ and stakeholders’ inputs, integrating both bottom-up and top-down initiatives, to orchestrate a shared and context-sensitive curriculum can only lead to sustainable changes.