December 2025 Newsletter – Issue 7
We’ve demonised the wrong thing. And it’s costing our students dearly.
India’s education discourse has become trapped in a false binary: memorisation bad, understanding good. NEP 2020 declares war on “rote learning”, while NCF 2023 celebrates “smriti” (memory). Educators are left confused, and students are caught in the crossfire of contradictory policies that treat memorisation and rote learning as synonyms when they’re fundamentally different.