INTRODUCTION
 

Education as an instrument of change has been given a lot of importance in the past year. For the very first time a national effort is being made to assess the opinions of our citizens with regard to the direction of our New Educational Policy. This volume as part of the previous-three entitled. "Towards Restructuring Indian Education : Citizens' Perception" carries the debate further through an analysis of 158 letters, seminars papers and documents, written in both English and Hindi by teachers, educational administrators, administrators outside education., other professionals, businessmen, journalists and students, to the Prime Minister's Secretariat and the Union Ministry of Human Resource Development.

The views of these correspondents are, however, not, very different to those expressed in the previous analysis. Their common consensus is that education is a, vital instrument of change which needs to be given far more prominence today. Education also needs to be linked, with other developmental projects in the country. Thus requiring a "systems approach" to its problems. The current model of development needs to be based upon "development administration" in which education forms a sub-system. They visualize a change which takes cognizance of both the human and the material needs. According, to them, the first task off education is the creation of a fuller human being, the methods of obtaining which require restructuring of content, curriculum, methodology, planning and management, finance and infrastructural inputs. A variety of methods have been suggested and are dealt with in the second part of the report.

Section I attempts to analyse categories of persons, responding to the Prime Minister's call for a nation-wide debate. It also deals with the analysis of the stages and aspects of education given priority by the correspondents. Though the analysis of these does not represent the view-point of the entire country, since the 158 letters have come from a few of the Indian States, it nevertheless gives us a rough ideas as to the focus of debate.

In following a method of content analysis, this volume has not deviated from the design of the previous three in this series, which takes into account two vital dimensions namely, a back-ground of the persons with regard to their statewise distribution and; (b) occupational status as in the earlier analysis. But based on the experience of earlier analysis, the category of 'Teachers and Educational Administrators', which was one category earlier, has now

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been broken into three categories i.e., 'School Teachers', 'College Teachers' and 'Educational Administrators'. This has been done in order to understand the possible difference of opinion on some of the issues raised by three different groups of people.

The issues in education with which people are concerned, have been classified in to 17 categories Here, without changing the actual classification, we have rearranged the order so as to ensure, a better linkage.

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