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ARTICLE AD BOX
Summary
Education reforms like the National Education Policy and National Curriculum Framework for School Education aim to turn the focus of Indian education from facts to faculties, but implementation has been rather slow. Bloated curricula may do more harm than good in an ever-changing world.
Human knowledge is growing. Across every field, the accumulated understanding of humanity is deepening and expanding. This is something to celebrate. It also creates a serious and under-appreciated problem for school education.
When education systems feel obligated to transmit ever-growing knowledge to children, the curriculum must also expand with it. But schooling is a limited phase; formal school education is generally constrained to 12 years.
The result, visible in schools across many countries including India, are curricula of extraordinary density. Students in classes six to 12 move through dense theoretical content across multiple subjects, including matters once addressed at the undergraduate level, all within a fixed school day.
The sheer volume is astonishing. Whether it results in learning is another question.
The relationship between content and learning is not linear. Up to a point, more content means more to learn. Beyond that, too much content means too little time to stay with any idea—topics get taught at a pace and shallowness that make genuine understanding impossible, while children and teachers resort to the only strategy that works: memorization.
The information intended to produce knowledge instead produces an illusion of it.
Research consistently shows that heavy curricular workloads lead students to adopt surface learning—skimming for facts rather than the deeper processing needed for critical thinking.
Rather than a failure of individual students or teachers, this is a structural consequence of asking for too much too fast across too many domains. Content and the development of capacities are not opposites—a child cannot learn to think in a vacuum; she needs subject matter to think through.
But beyond a threshold of content density, no space is left for human faculties like thinking. Everything collapses into recall.
Evidence only reaffirms this. An OECD 2020 study on curriculum overload found that countries consistently struggle with the same tension: the pressure to keep adding to curricula, driven by political, ideological and parental expectations, works against the depth of engagement that produces learning.
Its core recommendation, focus, rigour and coherence over breadth and coverage, is echoed by most serious studies.
India’s National Education Policy (NEP) 2020 confronted this problem squarely. Among the central failures it identified were rote-based teaching and course overload. It proposed a clear corrective: move from content transmission to competency development, align educational stages with how children actually learn, and restore time and space for understanding to occur.
The National Curriculum Framework for School Education (NCF) 2023 translated this into curricular terms. It explicitly states that courses must be designed with a focus on essential competencies and that the content load must be reduced. It calls for a shift from rote memorization to an approach that develops problem-solving, critical thinking and learning-to-learn skills, with the current examination culture that rewards recall transformed so that it can assess competencies as well.
Implementation is where most difficulties live. A framework can call for changes, but without alignment across curriculum design, textbooks, pedagogy and assessment, the intent of reform will remain on paper.
Teachers who have spent their whole careers covering syllabi will need sustained support to make the transition. Mere instruction will not be enough. Parents whose experience of education was defined by marks and memorization will need to be brought along. They cannot be treated as obstacles to bypass. And curriculum designers will need to resist the pull towards their own subject’s importance—the instinct that says: but surely children must also be taught this.
That instinct is the heart of the problem, and it is entirely human. No panel feels comfortable saying that something is not worth teaching. Every exclusion looks like a missed opportunity for learning. But this is precisely the judgement that good curriculum design requires. Designers must trust that less content taught well produces more learning than a barrage of information taught poorly.
The purpose of school education is not limited to transmitting as much human knowledge as possible before a child turns 18. That goal was always unreachable and becomes more so each decade.
The purpose is to build in each child the capacity to learn: to read carefully, reason from evidence, ask good questions and to sustain curiosity. A student who leaves school with these capacities well developed can, in the information-rich world she is entering, learn almost anything she subsequently wants or needs to learn.
The NEP 2020 and NCF 2023 have established this as a fundamental principle. The work of turning principle into practice—in classrooms, textbooks, examinations and teacher education—is what matters now.
It is slower and harder than writing a framework. It is also the only thing that will actually change what happens to children in school.
The author is CEO of Azim Premji Foundation.
English (US) ·