 HIGHER SECONDARY EDUCATION : ITS
 IMPORTANCE AND SCOPE

2.1 Introduction

2.1.1. The two-year higher secondary stage of education has an importance, meaning, nature and scope which need a brief overview and recall.

2.2. Importance of Higher Secondary

The Terminal

2.2.1. This two-year education stage is important because for about half of those entering it, it represents the terminal point of formal schooling, not the terminal point of education because learning is a life long process, and the formal, non-formal and informal learning systems must be geared to facilitate that process. But quantitatively the numbers invilved who will not be continuing Continuously their schooling after this higher secondary stage is large and impressive : They number around 800,000. For this substantial group, the learning experience at this stage of education becomes important for their living and decisive for their living gainful lives.

The Bridge

2.2.2. A second facet of the importance of this stage is that it is the bridge between the general information of the mind and personality which school education is and the higher learning specia- lizations which the college and university represent. This 'stage is on the one Hand as strong or as weak as the school stage is and is simultaneously a test of the soundness of the learning culture developed at the school. The higher secondary is in relation to the school both a mirror and a reflector. On the other hand the foundations for higher learning are laid at this stage. In that sense the university and the college can only build on the material formed at the higher secondary stage. This stage is thus both a judge of the school system and the forecaster of the learning futures of the university.

The Transition

2.2.3. The higher secondary stage also derives its uniqueness in human terms because it is dealing with the human person at a period of transition from childhood to youth, from infancy to teenage. This is the adolescent period of one's life when the personality and its components are growing, clashing, watching, imitating, demanding, giving, receiving, and sharing. Perhaps more than any other period in life, it is at this period that character begins to be formed. character as a multifaceted expression of the affective, the slow setting of the volitational, and. the boundless vistas opened up by the spiritual and intellectual. It is these many facets of the human personality at its formative stage that the higher secondary stage must subserve.

2.3. Principles Governing Scope of Higher Secondary

Principle of continuity

2.3.1 The development of the higher secondary stage will be governed by the principle of continuity. This principle has a double connotation. First there is the basic continuity of the newly formed higher secondary stage with the past educational system. After all the impediments have been lopped off, the errors corrected and the twists and turns all

strightened out, allowing for all the innovations and responses to new, emerging, changing national and local needs, there is a carry over in terms of knowledge and information, trained teachers, buildings, books, and equipment from the past into the new structure which the+2 stage represents. There is need to be conscious of this continuity, to accept it and regulate it. The other aspect of the continuity element is in the fact that the higher secondary stage is part of a total educational and learning system and must conform to its own internal laws of consistency and conformity. This form of it's continuity means that it must constantly look over its shoulders at the school from which it originates and lookout to the university and the college, of which it is a systems part.

Principle of International Sharing

2.3.2 A second principle which helps in the growth and flowering of the higher secondary stage is that like all learning, it also functions under the principle of the international storehouse which both enriches and widens educational systems everywhere. Higher secondary schooling is new to the country, but it is also one area which has no national boundaries, where there is an international community represented by UNESCO and various regional and sub-regional organisations through whom the secrets of success and the reasons for failures are known. In this sense there is no area of isolation and lonely pioneering in this rich international landscape : Gandhi learning from Tolstoy for his first educational effort : the Hungarian higher secondary school in lake Balaton drawing upon Tagore : Ho Chi Minh's schooling in the commune driving from Mao Tse Tung, and so on. But this international storehouse is for the higher secondary planner not only a source of inspiration and information ; it is also a yardstick for evaluation of the national and local effort.

Principle of Conforming to National Goals

2.3.3 Above all, higher secondary education must be integrated with the goals of national development in the sense that it must serve them and be judged by the extent to which it is helping in their realisation. At this particular point of time, before the presentation to and approval by the National Development Council of the Sixth Five-Year Plan, it is somewhat hazardous to define very precisely the goals of national development. Subject to these being reviewed and revised when the National Plan is approved, there are four facets of national development which are by consensus emerging as the overall time bound targets and it is to these that the higher secondary system needs to be linked both in its general and vocationalised sector.

Removal of Unemployment

2.3.3.1 A first national target is to remove unemployment and under- employment within the next 10 years. This is a hard and somewhat ambitious tasks. NSS estimates That there are at present 19 million man years of unemployment and that 70 million persons have to be provided work in the next decade. This means creating something like 200,000 employment units a week, which cannot be wage employment (no known economy can create employment at this rate), but various forms of self-employment. Further the manufacturing sector is not able to absorb the currently trained personnel. The Madras Institute of Development studies in its 1975 study, the Status of unemployed craftsman in Tamil Nadu, reports that 20,000 I.T.I. completers are unemployed (that State's Directorate of Employment and Training reports that as at December 1977, 30,000 are unemployed). For the country as a whole, the number of unemployed I.T.I. craftmen is even more disquieting as is the number of polytechnician and university engineers. The employment profile of the country in capsule form is : of 260 million workers, 20 million are employed in the organised sector and 5.7 million in factories, the organised sector itself being able to absorb annually only 500,000 workers per year. Thus the implications of self-employment and the importance of the non- manufacturing sector for the plus 2 stage need to be borne in mind.

Removal of Destitution

2.3.3.2 The second agreed national aim is to remove destitution also within the next 10 years. Destitution refers to the worst form of poverty, that is, of the 50 per cent of our people living below the poverty line, the bottom two deciles constitute the destitudes. While the removal of unemployment and under-employment is a necessary condition for the removal of destitution, it is not a sufficient condition, because first poverty covers about 5 to 6 times more families than unemployment or under-employment, but even more because employment and poverty or even destitution co-exist in the country. The higher secondary stage must, like the rest of the education system, make its contribution to the removal of poverty through its openness and capacity to hold within itself an increasing mass of first generation learners, and through making productive work one of the fountain sources of learning the other being books. In that way it will contribute to increasing producivity.

Rural Development

2.3.3.3 The third emerging objective is rural development, village uplift and encouragement to tiny, cottage and small industries. It is recognised that India lives in her villages and the processes of national development must reflect this reality. The Integrated Rural Development Programme, along with the programmes of Small and Marginal Farmers Development, Integrated Tribal Development, Drought Prone Area Development, Community Area Development, and Whole Area Development, with their emphasis on optimum utilisation of the local human, biological and natural resources and appropriate inputs of science and technology will be covering 50 per cent of the blocks of the country during the Sixth Plan. The educational system must form part of this micro-level planning and the higher secondary stage must be geared to the strategies for rural development and village uplift. There is also the problem of the + 2 completer (not in frequently urged also by the parents) not wanting to follow the low-paying rural parental occupation, and not wishing to continue living in the low quality of life village structure. At this point, it is important to remind oneself that it is wise not to exaggerate the possibilities of education being a solution to all the problems of society. That way lies the certainty of education not being able to attain even the limited goals which are within its universe of discourse. It must be admitted that education does arouse the desire to better oneself and the rural exodus-the rural-urban brain drain-has many complex pull and push factors behind it, to which education has only a marginal relationship. In so far as higher secondary education is set within the frame of integrated rural development and is linked to its crucial features of agricultural modernisation and the development of rural crafts and industries, it can make a marginal contribution. This contribution though marginal can be decisive, if there is a revival and development of the rural economy, and if the + 2 stage prepares its pupils to play their full part in the growth of the agricultural as well as tiny, cottage and small-scale sectors.

Adult Literacy

2.3.3.4 There is one more important national purpose, that is, the universalisation of primary education and removal of adult illiteracy to be attained within a five-year period, that the formal school system must serve. Universalisation of primary education involves increasing the holding power of the primary schools as against the 50 per cent of pupils presently left-out, pushed-out or who drop-out and providing the infrastructure for this large expansion, along with the realisation that the problem is only partly pedagogic. On the other purpose, of the 230 million adult illiterates, the national programme sets itself in a first phase to educate and make self-reliant 100 million persons in the age-group 15-35 in the next 5 years. To fulfil these mass mandates the school must serve as an important instrument, and in particular the students under the guidance of teachers in the higher secondary school should organise and run functional literacy programmes in the villages or urban slums of their neighbourhood.

2.4 Scope

2.4.1 The Higher Secondary Stage should be planned as comprising two broad learning components which may be termed the General Education Spectrum and the Vocationalised Spectrum, with many crossover points during and after this particular stage.

2.4.2 The General Education Spectrum of the Higher Secondary School is for the general formation of the person and personality through learning centred around languages socially useful productive work and a combination of the starting phases of some 4 natural social or human sciences disciplines. Its aim is essentially to prepare the student for university education in the arts or sciences or for professional studies. This is the bridge facet of the plus 2 stage referred to earlier in paragraph 2.2.2. This is also the phase of the educational systems in which there is a built-in continuity with the past, the main innovation being learning acquired from socially useful productive work.

2.4.2.1 The concept and objectives of socially useful productive work which form part of the General Education Spectrum have been defined by the Ishwarbhai Patel Committee for the curriculum of the ten-year school and are continued at this plus 2 stage of learning with minor adaptations :

"Socially Useful Productive Work may be described as purposive, meaningful, manual work resulting in either goods or services which are useful to the community. Purposive, productive work and services related to the needs of the (student) and the community will prove meaningful to the learner. Such work must not be performed mechanically, but must include planning, analysis and detailed preparation, at every stage, so that it is educational in essence. Adoption of improved tools and material, where available and the adoption of modern techniques will lead to an appreciation of the needs of a progressive society, based on technology."

The objectives of this part of learning are to :-

"(i) prepare (students) to practise and perform Manual work individually and collectively ;

(ii) acquaint (students) with the world of work and services to the community and develop in them a sense of respect for manual workers ;

(iii) develop a desire to be useful members of society and contribute their best to the common 'good ;

(iv) indicate positive attitudes of team work and socially desirable values like selfreliance, dignity of labour, tolerance, co-operation, sympathy and helpfulness ;

(v) help in understanding the principles involved in the various forms of work; and

(vi) lead (students) to participate increasingly in productive work as they go from one stage of education to another and, thereby, enable them to earn while they learn."

2.4.3 The Vocationalised Spectrum of the Higher Secondary School is learning of a skill or a range of skills through study of technologies, whited sciences, and farm or other practical work. This vocationalised learning must be distinguished from technical/vocational education imparted in the I.T.Is, technical high schools, agricultural or industrial polytechnics, where a certain level of skill as craftsman or technician or extension agent is aimed at and attained. The vocationalisation spectrum that is referred to embraces in the UNESCO language "these aspects of the educational process involving, in addition to general education, the study of technologies and related sciences and the acquisition of practical skills, aptitudes, understanding and knowledge relating to occupations in the various sectors of

economic and social life. Such an education would be an integral part of general education and a means of preparing for an occupational field and an aspect of continuing education." This spectrum refers back to the terminal character of formal schooling that it represents for over 50 per cent of its entrants as referred to in paragraph 2.2.1 Given the unemployment levels of I.T.I. craftsmen and polytechnicians referrd to earlier, expansion of technical/professional education institutions of this nature is not recommended. The recommendation about the Vocationalised Spectrum of the plus 2 stage rests, however, on the truth that while education cannot produce jobs, vocationalised education makes it more likely for an individual to get a job or to be his own master by either starting a new productive activity or a service which may satisfy a felt-need of the community. By broadening the educational horizons for the individual, it enables him to reach higher levels of achievement through self-learning. Since the content and scope of vocationalisation must be in conformity with national goals and the specific needs of the local community at every given point of time, the vocationalisation of higher secondary education recommended here aims for the next five years at increasing the employment potential of the people through education for self- employment, with emphasis on agricultural and related occupations including tiny, small, cottage and agro-industries and through preparation for specific competencies in different vocations.

2.5 Futures

2.5.1. This report is quite deliberately dated. It is meant to guide higher secondary education planning for the next five to ten years. Taking a longer view there are at least two issues that demand future attention. One is related to the rather restricted concept of vocationalisation of secondary education as distinguished sharply from vocational and technical education. As the economy picks up and moves out of its stagnant 3 to 3.5 per cent compound growth rate over the past three decades to something nearer the doubling at 7 per cent being considered for the future plans, the increased demand for technician, agrarian and managerial skills will call for planning for vocational/technical education as well as vocationalisation of general education.

2.5.2 A second issue that was considered was whether the free and compulsory primary school should be an 8-year school an envisaged in the Constitution, whether there should be a public examination at this stage to mark it off and give it status, and whether vocationalisation could then be pushed down to Classes IX and X of the 10-year school. There was general agreement that within the 10-year school, the first phase should be to get all children into the five-year elementary cycle followed by the 2 or 3 years middle school cycle, with an educational and extra educational effort to increase the holding power of the two cycles. It was also agreed that it is not desirable to recommend a public examination at this stage because when this phase of getting all children into the 7 or 8 year primary school is met, there should be an uninterrupted transition to getting all children into the next stage of the 2 or 3 year secondary school. Pushing down vocationalised education to Class IX has the advantage of providing a 4-year integrated course which could surpass the polytechnic level. But at present, more polytechnicians, as noted earlier, are not needed. Moreover, if there is a possible dilemma in the student choosing intelligently at the end of 10-year of schooling between the General Education and Vocationalised Spectrums, it would be even more puzzling for the 12-14 year old to make such a choice at Class VIII. Work education, Socially Useful Productive Work from which each student in Class IX and X will be garnering knowledge spending on it 20 per cent of the school time-yes. Vocationalised education which means starting oil a technology training at Class IX-No.

HIGHER SECONDARY EDUCATION : ITS IMPORTANCE AND SCOPE