HOLISTIC EDUCATION AS A PATHWAY TO HUMAN EXCELLENCE: PHILOSOPHICAL PERSPECTIVES AND CONTEMPORARY SIGNIFICANCE IN NEP 2020

Education plays a key role in unlocking an individual’s full potential. It supports a person’s physical, mental, social, and emotional development, fostering overall human growth. Today, the emerging concept of integrating, balancing, and promoting comprehensive development is called holistic development. For holistic development, holistic education is essential, as highlighted in the Indian New National Education Policy (NEP) 2020. This paper aims to discuss the role of holistic education in Human Excellence, analyse its philosophical foundation, and explore its contemporary relevance under NEP 2020. Holistic education is a broader idea that seeks a balanced development of physical, cognitive, emotional, social, ethical, and spiritual aspects of personality. Its goal is to nurture creativity, innovative thinking, ethical values, empathy, and develop Human excellence. Human excellence is the quality of an individual that incorporates ethical & moral, intellectual & creative, spiritual, emotional, and practical life skills. Both Indian and Western philosophy provide the bases of holistic education. In this study, the researcher employed the content analysis methodology within the descriptive research approach. This study found a strong philosophical base of holistic education, NEP 2020 give special focus on it, “multidisciplinarity and a holistic education across the sciences, social sciences, arts, humanities, and sports for a multidisciplinary world in order to ensure the unity and integrity of all knowledge”(Ministry of Education, 2020, p.5) and its plays crucial role for human excellence. This study will help students, teachers, educational administrators, researchers, educational policymakers, and educators who are involved in education and society to understand the concept of holistic child development through education, as outlined in the pathways of NEP 2020 and its underlying philosophical foundation. Keywords: Holistic Education; holistic development; Human Excellence; NEP-2020; Philosophical Foundations; Contemporary Relevance.