FOREWORD
 

I am very grateful to Justice V.M. Tarkunde and his colleagues for preparing this valuable document on EDUCATION FOR OUR PEOPLE and presenting it to the nation for deliberation and action.

I have always had a deep faith in the capacity of education to bring about individual growth and social transformation. Unfortunately, the formal system of education which we have created for ourselves does not serve either of these purposes. On the one hand, it gives wrong education to the upper and middle classes who are its principal beneficiaries. It makes them aliens to their own culture through the adoption of the values and life-styles of a consumption-oriented industrial society. It also converts them into a parasitic class which perpetuates and even intensifies the poverty of the masses. On the other hand, the common people, who mostly remain outside the school system in spite of its huge size and enormous cost, continue to be deprived, not only of education, but also of many other good things of life. The system has thus failed to promote individual growth. It also becomes more of a hinderance than a help to bring about an egalitarian transformation.

This document tries to indicate what a good national system of education for our country should be, and how it can be created over the next ten years or so. It highlights the need to change the class- orientation of the existing system, and to reorganize it with the education of the people as its central objective. This necessarily implies a massive programme of adult education which will enable the common people to know and assert themselves and involve them in meaningful and challenging programmes for improving the quality of their life. It will also imply the early fulfilment of the constitutional directive to provide good elementary education to all children. It will further imply a substantial increase in the access of the common people to secondary and higher education, the adoption of Indian languages as media of instruction at all stages and an intensive programme for the discovery and development of talent which will look upon all gifted children as wards of the state and assist them to

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realize their full potential. Needless to say, these measures will necessarily imply a corresponding reduction of the privileges and advantages which the upper and middle classes now enjoy within the education system. In short, this document clearly brings out what we shall have to do to provide good education to all our people and to create a social milieu where every individual can have the widest possible opportunity for life-long learning.

What is even more important, this document suggests a seven-point programme to bring about this transformation.

(1) As education can only be planned in terms of a broader social context, it highlights the need for transforming the existing inegalitarian social and wage structures and pursue a programme of simultaneous and complementary social and educational reforms.

(2) It stresses the equally urgent need to transform the existing educational structure, to shift the emphasis from teaching to learning, to stress the incidental and non-formal channels of education, to involve the entire community in the educational process rather than depend exclusively upon the professional teachers, and to make the system decentralized, diversified, elastic, and dynamic.

(3) It emphasizes the need for starting this movement for radical reform simultaneously within and without the educational system as a collaborative effort between educational and socio- political workers.

(4) It accords high priority to changing the ethos of the entire system so that hard and dedicated work to pursue knowledge, excellence, and social transformation becomes a way of life within the system.

(5) It underlines the need for making certain hard political and academic decisions to make the system purposeful and effective.

(6) It emphasizes the primacy of work among the people at the gross-roots level.

(7) It underscores the significance of a mass movement on the basis of solving the day-to-day problems in the lives of the common people and to help them come into their own. It is only such a movement that will generate the needed socioeconomic forces and enable the country to provide good education to the people; and the educational effort itself will strengthen the programmes of mass mobilization for improving the quality of life in society.

I heartily commend these proposals to the people. Their success will

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obviously depend upon the close collaboration between the educational, social, and political workers. It will depend even more upon the number and quality of individuals who are committed to its objectives and who are prepared to dedicate themselves to the development of its programmes. This is a glorious challenge to the government as well as to the educational, social, and political workers at this critical juncture in our history when the courage and wisdom of our people have given us yet another opportunity to shape our destiny. I earnestly appeal to all of them to recognize the urgency and uniqueness of this challenge and to rise to the occasion.

Patna JAYAPRAKASH NARAYAN

21 January 1978