A NEW CONCEPT AND STRUCTURE OF EDUCATION
3.01 A detailed discussion of the social transformation to be attempted as a part of this package deal of simultaneous social and educational transformation is outside the scope of this exercise which concentrates on the educational transformation we need. The central programme of this transformation is a radical reform of the value system, processes, and organization of the formal system of education which we have laboured over 150 years to create and which has now become a gigantic enterprise which mostly keeps the poor people out does not even provide good education to the bulk of its students, and also hinders the social transformation we seek. The task is of the highest priority; and any delay in its implementation implies that the size of the formal system and its inertia will increase further in the meantime and that this will add to the cost and energy required to reform it.
3.02 Value System. The existing educational system lays greater emphasis on individualism, competition, verbal fluency or linguistic ability, and mere acquisition of information. What is even worse, the ethos of the existing -system is highly authoritarian where values such as equality, love of truth, or spirit of enquiry cannot be fostered. In the new concept of education, we should recognize the significance of social objectives, cooperation and team-work, the complementarity of intellectual and manual work, promotion of skills, and the building up of character. Similarly, great emphasis will have to be placed on promoting a scientific outlook on life and the basic values of pursuit of truth, equality, freedom, justice and dignity of the individual.
3.03 An Integrated, Participatory System of Formal and NonFormal Education. The existing system places an almost exclusive emphasis on formal education and on teaching instead of on learning. In the new system, emphasis will have to be shifted from teaching to learning and incidental and non-formal education should receive an equal. If not even greater emphasis, and the formal, incidental, and
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non-formal systems should be blended together in an integrated fashion. In the existing system, there is only one channel of full- time attendance. In the new system, all the three channels of full- time, part-time, and own-time education should be freely used and should have equal status so that it would be possible for a student to transfer himself from one to the other according to his needs. The existing system operates on the basis of a single-point entry, sequential annual promotions, and an almost unbroken. continuous stretch of education. In the new system, recurrent education should be developed and promoted; and there should be several points of entry as well as flexibility for condensing or prolonging the duration of courses of levels. It would, therefore, be possible for a student to join and step off the education system whenever and as often as may be necessary, and also to regulate the pace of his studies. The existing system places an almost exclusive emphasis on full-time professional teachers and on the school as the sole educational institution. In the new system, all teaching resources available in the community should be utilized and all social institutions should be used for educational purposes. In fact. the new educational system should be extremely flexible to meet the needs of life-long learning for every individual. It should also allow for the fullest participation by institutions and individuals ordinarily considered to be outside the educational system and also mere towards abolishing the distinction between teachers (who are really senior students) and students (who in effect are junior teachers) because every individual should be learning whatever he is interested in from others and simultaneously teaching whatever he can to those who are interested to learn it from him. In fact, the new educational system may rightly be described as education of the people, for the people, and by the people.
3.04 Relevance and Transformation of Content. A major weakness of the existing system is the lack of relevance of most of what we teach, not only to the poor people who are outside the system, but even to the upper and middle classes who are inside it. This irrelevance arises from several factors such as,
- an over-emphasis on mere acquisition of information;
- the common practice of framing curricula with an ascending objective, viz., the curriculum of the elementary school prepares a student for the secondary stage, the secondary school fits a student
20 Education For Our People
for a college and almost unfits him for everything else, and a B.A. degree tries to make a person eligible for a master's degree or a well-paid and generally white-collar job. Such curricula obviously become irrelevant to those who do not proceed to the next stage and these generally constitute the vast majority) or fail to get a job; the organization of the curriculum mainly on the basis of middle-class values which cannot be generalized and which have no relevance to the life and needs of the vast majority of the people; the practice of centralized curriculum construction and the great emphasis placed on uniformity rather than on diversity which makes it difficult, if not impossible, to relate education to local environment or to individual aptitudes and capacities; and the failure to adjust the content of education to changing social or national needs, due mainly to the inertia of the system.
3.05 This irrelevance of education progressively alienates the intellectual community from the people and the basic problems of the society. It is, therefore, obviously necessary to take appropriate steps to remove these causes that lead to irrelevance in the content of education. But this is not enough; and we must also adopt a number of positive measures to make the content of education relevant to social transformation and national development. Among these, the following deserve emphasis:
(1) The cultural aspects of education which are generally neglected at present should receive considerable emphasis. Students should be helped to `discover' India, to be patriotic, to take a proper pride in their cultural heritage, and yet to be sensitive to modern ideas and values and to the weaknesses in our own tradition which have to be overcome.
(2) Mahatma Gandhi had rightly diagnosed that the traditional middle class values of glorifying intellectual work and denigrating manual labour (which had dominated our educational system and led to a total divorce between work and education) had disastrous effects, on both the individual and the society. What a healthy, egalitarian, and non-exploitative society needed was a citizen who was a good productive worker as well as an educated and cultured individual. He, therefore, advocated the view that good education must reunite work and education. This would make the upper and middle classes better individuals because participation in socially useful productive work, not only develops skills, but cultivates the intellect and values as well.
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It will also enrich the masses who would receive education and be able to resist exploitation through organized effort.
(3) In a poor society like that of ours, development is so significant and urgent that, over the next 10-15 years we must make every person development-minded and induce him to work intensively for it on the basis of the highest priority. Such a national objective cannot be realized if the education system which, as pointed out earlier, now involves about 16 per cent of the entire population and consumes nearly four per cent of the national income were to be neutral to this developmental effort or, as often happens, pursues even contrary objectives. We just cannot afford to run education and development as two separate and parallel (or even partially contradictory) systems. It would be far more effective and economical to run them as complementary systems, each supporting the other. This can happen only if development, like work, also becomes a medium of education and all students and teachers are involved in appropriate programmes of development at all stages of education.
(4) The proper teaching of science and an appropriate technology must be emphasized at all stages of education. Science can be of great help to rid our traditional society of superstition, fatalism, and irrational fear and in promoting the rational temper which a modern society needs. Appropriate technology can help us to abolish poverty and ill-health and to raise the standards of living of the people. Every citizen must, therefore, be aware of the potential of science and technology and adequate competence to use them.
(5) Great emphasis is to be laid on the ethos necessary for the democratic, socialist, and secular society we desire to create. Negatively, it implies a fight against traditional values and customs which impede the creation of this new society, e.g., casteism, communalism, inequality of men and women, of feudal and capitalist life-styles. Positively, it implies the development of such values and skills as tolerance, self-restraints, concern for others, commitment to basic human values and a capacity to fight and suffer for them if necessary, ability to work together with other individuals and groups in shared programmes with common objectives, and willingness and capacity to resolve conflicts through discussion, give and take and other peaceful means.
3.06 Standards. Education is a double-edged tool. If it is of good quality, it helps individual growth, social transformation, and national development. But if proper standards are not maintained, it can lead
22 Education For Our People
both individuals and societies down the hill to personal disaster or social disintegration. Maintaining the quality of education thus becomes a task of supreme importance. Relevance of content is an important but only one aspect of the problem, The second is the provision of adequate facilities - institutions, teachers, equipment. The third is the creation of a climate of hard, sustained, and dedicated work by teachers and students because education is essentially a stretching process. It should be emphasized, however, that standards should not be measured, as at present, merely by the extent of information acquired by the students or by their linguistic ability, especially in English. They should be measured in broader individual and social terms by the total personality development of the students and by the social commitments and contributions of students, teachers, and educational institutions.
3.07 In the existing educational system, the standards of education maintained are good in a small number of institutions which, as pointed out earlier, are used by the small upper crust of rich and well-to-do persons. On the other hand, the standards are poor or even deplorable in the vast majority of the institutions which are used by the bulk of the people. In the new system of education, there is no place for this dualism. This does not, however, mean an indiscriminate equalization of all institutions. In secondary and higher education, in particular, there would no doubt be some high quality and pace-setting institutions in every sector. But the position would differ from the present one in two significant ways. On the one hand, access to these high quality institutions would not be confined to the privileged as at present, and effort would be made to ensure that, through a well-planned programme of cultivation of talent, scholarships and placement, these institutions would also be availed of by talented children from the under-privileged social groups. On the other hand, the standards in the bulk of the institutions which are very unsatisfactory at present would be substantially raised and no institution would be allowed to fall below certain prescribed levels.
3.08 Flexibility, Diversity, and Dynamism. The present educational system is based on an over-emphasis on centralization and uniformity and has consequently become rigid and inelastic: the axiom that either all move or none moves can only make everyone immobile. In a vast and plural society like that of ours, the attempts to create a uniform and rigid educational system is foredoomed to failure. It will also be counter-productive because every such attempt
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will fall below the capacity of good schools which will not be able to utilize their full potential just as it will be beyond the reach of the weaker institutions and lead to still greater inefficiency. India stands for unity in diversity. We should, therefore, try to evolve a unity in the fundamentals at the national level and then evolve a highly decentralized, flexible, and dynamic system which provides adequate scope for diversity, experimentation and innovation by state systems, schools, and teachers.