Mandarin missing from National Education Policy 2020's foreign languages list

New Dehi, Aug 02: The National Education Policy (NEP) has not mentioned Mandarin - group of Sinitic Chinese languages - from the list of the examples of foreign languages like Japanese, Thai, French, German, Spanish, Portuguese, and Russian which will be taught at the secondary level.

The government also pointed out that foreign language vocabulary should be updated in the text books and other printing materials. The suggested foreign languages in this regard are Korean, Japanese, Thai, English, French, Portuguese, Russian, German, Hebrew and Japanese.

According to The Hindu, there is no mention of Mandarin from the NEP's final Policy document. However, Mandarin was present in the draft policy that was released in May 2019.

According to The Hindu, the 2019 draft policy version said, "A choice of foreign languages such as French, German, Spanish, Chinese, Japanese would be offered and available to interested students to choose."

Meanwhile, the government included the Korean language to the new National Education Policy that can be taught in schools. However, it should be noted that Korean language was not recommended as a foreign language in the first draft by the National Education Policy preparation committee in 2019.

The Union Cabinet on Wednesday approved the new National Education Policy (NEP) that is expected to set the roadmap for the sector keeping in mind present employment scenario. This policy comes after almost three decades, and post deliberation of almost six years.

Replacing the 10+2 structure of school curricula with a 5+3+3+4 curricular structure corresponding to age groups 3-8, 8-11, 11-14 and 14-18 years respectively, scrapping M.Phil programmes and implementing common norms for private and public higher education institutions are among other salient features of the new policy.

Prime Minister Narendra Modi had said the new education policy announced by the government emphasises on making ''job creators'' instead of ''job seekers'' and is an attempt to transform the intent and the content of the country''s education system.