SECONDARY EDUCATION
 

Improving Quality of Secondary Education

4.1. While the highest priority has to be given to the expansion of elementary education and promotion of adult education, it is equally important to improve secondary education so that on leaving the schools a student can enter life with self-reliance and confidence and take up work well equipped with general knowledge and relevant skills.

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Diversification and Lightening of Academic Load

4.2. The curriculum of the secondary education should be diversified and its burden made lighter by shedding excess, academic load so as to facilitate and help the development of the total personality. The curricular and co-curricular programmes, physical education, games, socially useful productive work and social service should be designed to help students acquire the knowledge and skills, attitudes and values, essential to a democratic, secular and socialist society with Gandhian values of life.

4.3. Diversification of education programme should take note of the pattern of diversified decentralized economy in rural areas where the accent is on rural industrialization, minor irrigation, rural health, rural electrification, rural housing and other programmes of rural development.

Role of Secondary Education

4.4. The entire educational system has to be seen as one chain. The central link in this chain is that of secondary education because it is through this that backward and forward linkages are established. Elementary education has to be so structured as to strengthen the foundations of secondary education and secondary education has to be so structured that students can be sufficiently equipped both in knowledge and skills to straightway join any part of economic life. Secondary education should be comprehensive both to be terminal for those who do not want or cannot proceed for further education, and to have a strong academic foundation for higher studies for those who show intelligence and aptitude for that education. Besides, the system should be so evolved that the students can opt out of one stream to the other as and when they desire.

Vocational Education

4.5. However, both streams in secondary education should have strong vocational component in the curricula and should

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be diversified to satisfy the needs of both the above mentioned streams. Obviously, for terminal secondary education voca- tionalization. would have much larger component than for the other stream. Foundations for vocationalization of secondary education will have to be laid even earlier through socially useful productive work with accent on practical work becoming an integral component of elementary school curriculum.

4.6. The vocational education spectrum will consist of a range of knowledge and skills, training in technologies, together with a study of the related sciences, farming and other practical work. For this purpose a systematic linkage should be established with the facilities available in the neighbourhood. The objective should be to give students fitness for employment or a capacity for self-employment.

4.7. Introduction of programmes of vocationalization would have to be preceded by surveys which would indicate broad and qualitative assessment of emerging employment apportunities which are local specific. Such surveys and assessments should be periodic so that vocationalization programmes are reviewed, modified and changed from time to time.

4.8. Vocationalization programme, by its very nature, will have to involve all development departments. However, there is need for one coordinated agency to look after various aspects of the programme like programme information, development of course, content, standards of achievement, liaison with employment agencies, identification of institutional courses, etc.

4.9. Efforts should be made to provide for vocational courses and opportunities for vertical and horizontal mobility through the provision of appropriate, diploma and certificate courses through non- formal methods. The products of vocational courses should have opportunities for upward professional mobility.

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4.10. Vocationalization for self-employment should reckon with the need for supplementary inputs like credit, market, etc. and should also aim at extending the scope of possibilities of effective tie-up with the district industrial centres and other institutions being set up in the country. The student completing the existing vocational courses should be given due recognition. To promote vocationalization, apprenticeship schemes should be extended to those courses also.

Community involvement

4.11. The school and the community will have to be brought together. Involvement of the community in identifying the kinds of programmes and courses and provision of facilities by them in their enterprises and establishments will ensure success of the programme. This will also. among other things, throw up work opportunities for self-employment.

4.12. In view of the decentralization of economic planning where the thrust is on area development with improving the lot of individual families, the programme of vocationalization has to be decentralized and local bodies and communities involved in its formulation and implementation.

Expansion of Secondary Education

4.13. Facilities for secondary education will have to be expanded in rural areas and the smaller towns in order to reduce the gap between rural and the urban population. Special efforts will be made to provide access to the weaker sections. Access may also be enlarged by the introduction of correspondence part-time and own-time courses of study and by allowing private candidates to appear in public examinations.