Can Concepts Cross Disciplinary Boundaries?

Many people have chosen to see novelty in the new National Education Policy (NEP) that has been recently announced by the central government, while others, understandably, have expressed their scepticism, about the lofty claims the policymakers have made about it. One point that should draw our attention in this debate is the retention of some concepts within and across disciplinary boundaries. One, however, is still left guessing about which concepts from the proposed syllabus have been retained and which have been dropped. The NEP 2020 does not seem to be categorical in stating the origin of language of these concepts. Where are these concepts coming from? Does their origin lie in English, Sanskrit or the regional languages? Moreover, the NEP 2020 does not state which concepts have the cognitive capacity to cross individual disciplinary boundaries and conceptually enrich the much broader interdisciplinary field that has been one of the stated concerns of the NEP 2020.

In this regard, it is important to take note of the fact that some core concepts do originate in the public speeches that are made by activists–intellectuals in and through the sociopolitical struggle of the masses. Put differently, a network of communication that facilitates the transmission of concepts does exist beyond the textbooks and the closed-door transactions in the classrooms. The moot point would be to see whether these struggle concepts with a mass social base do travel from the regional language and enter the classroom transactions.