Abstract
Given the state of total neglect of the child’s experience and knowledge in existing classroom practices, the emphasis of the National Curriculum Framework (NCF) 2005 on child-centred education is important. Equally important, if not more so, is the disentangling of issues of pedagogy, learning theories and epistemology. This essay argues that in the NCF 2005 there seems to be some confusion between pedagogy, cognition and epistemology. It also compares its pedagogic approach to that of the Hoshangabad Science Teaching Programme (HSTP) which was based on learning science through experiments. However, both are silent on the philosophical issues of knowledge creation and the transfer of knowledge in education. While focusing on these issues, this essay questions the notion of the child as a constructor of knowledge from an epistemological perspective.
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