Exploring the importance of moral values in education and the NEP’s emphasis on developing well-rounded individuals

Moral education may be defined as helping children and young people to acquire a set of beliefs and values regarding what is right and wrong. This set of beliefs guides their intentions, attitudes, and behaviours towards others and their environment. Moral education also helps children develop the disposition to act in accordance with such beliefs and values. More fundamentally, it encourages children to reflect on how they should behave and what sort of people they should be. For many people, these questions are linked to religious belief, but moral education programs treat religion and morality as conceptually distinct. Moral educators believe that many young people living in the contemporary world can become morally confused by exposure to factors that may destabilize their moral values, including television, print media, the Internet, social changes in family structures, poor role models in public life, the prioritization of economic values, and continuing gender equality.
The National Education Policy (NEP) was launched in 2020 by the Government of India. It was crafted and designed by the National Educational Policy Panel under the Ministry of Human Resource Development, depending upon the suggestions/outputs of the various other Ministries of Education, and finally approved and launched by the Govt. It encompasses the all-round educational unification of diversified subjects and aims at achieving full human potential and developing an equitable and just society. The policy lays particular emphasis on the development of the creative potential of each individual. It is based on the principle that education must develop not only cognitive but also social, ethical, moral, and emotional capacities and dispositions.
With humans becoming more of a corporatized mechanical machine, moral values have been kept on the backburner. In our middle schooling, Moral Science cum Moral Education was a compulsory subject up to middle school. The impact that subject had on us can be considered dramatically positive in terms of human values. In my opinion, that particular subject, like other subjects such as Science and Math, has its essence to a high quality of life. Moral education declined in schools because it was considered unnecessary, as it has a religious connotation with the word “moral.” With each society having a set of morals, it was felt that the moral values would overlap and would lead to a detrimental cascading effect.
If you’ll notice the way the world works nowadays, you’ll realize that there are clashing sets of morals. And if everyone has a different set of morals, whose do we pick to teach our students? The moral values I am referring to are the ones that are universally accepted, those beyond the realms of religious beliefs and narrow-minded stereotypes. Say, helping the elderly, sharing food with others, love for others, love for nature, respect for elders and teachers, being generous, showing consideration, being compassionate, etc., are universally accepted moral values.
It is strongly felt that moral education to the students by inculcating such moral values will act as a fillip in making the students proceed with the journey of their life by the principles of truthfulness, honesty, charity, hospitality, tolerance, love, kindness, and sympathy. It’s time the Government takes up initiatives for training programs on moral education sessions to the employees who are working in various organizations, institutions, businesses, and companies.
With moral education as a subject accompanied by many initiatives on programs, courses, and project works by concerned stakeholders on moral values, it doesn’t stop me from hoping that the NEP 2020 will become a really successful and accomplishing one, bringing Indian education many levels above, which will be envied by other Nations. We need to make our future generations realize the need for moral education in shaping their all-around development of mind, body, and soul and turn mechanical beings into social beings.
The writer teaches Sociology at Government Higher Secondary School Gadole, Kokernag. He can be reached at [email protected]

Zahid Hussain Dar