 PRAGMATIC APPROACH TO WORK EXPERIENCE

Dr. G. L. Bakhshi

Of all the changes contemplated under the new 10+2+3 pattern of education recently adopted by the Central Board of Secondary Education in its member-schools, the introduction of work experience as a compulsory part of the school curriculum is the most vital.

This however, has raised doubts and misgivings in the minds of some people, which is not unnatural, considering that this change envisages a drastic departure from the age-old conception of education which kept learning and earning strictly apart. In all societies, when education was first started in an organised manner, it was confined to a selected few. We have travelled far from those days and we are in an era when education is not for the selected few but is sought to be made universal. It is now universally agreed that education should be relevant to life and should not only train the mind, refine the intellect, and culture the emotions, but it should also improve the productive capacities of the individuals.

The change has been received very enthusiastically by most people who have hailed it as a reform long overdue. There are however, some isolated voices of resistance which mainly arise because of lack of proper awareness about the nature and scope of work experience at the school level.

The first obvious question is, what is work experience? This seems to be a very simple question but if not handled pragmatically it can result in a lot of academic discussion and hair-splitting which can only result in thwarting the starting of this programme.

New Concept

A new concept like work experience would offer obvious difficulties if it is sought to be reduced to a one sentence defini- tion. It is essential that this new discipline is taught on the basis of certain commonly accepted concepts which will get refined as we go along on the road of implementation.

Work experience has been introduced to provide a corrective to some of the Deficiencies of the present system of education, and to make it more relevant to life. In fact, it provides one of the most essential dimensions to education which has been missing so far and which has been acutely felt by all right thinking persons.

The present system of education, except for a few good excep- tions, has been producing young people who are not found easily employable and what is worse, who themselves are lacking in self confidence because they have not been trained in any skill or creative activity which could enable them to face the challenges of life. The introduction of work experience is a step to remove this handicap, not because it will create jobs for everybody (that depends upon economic factors) but because it will make the products of education relatively more employable and it will imbue them with greater self-confidence because of their experience of having produced something.

It has, therefore been decided to adopt a very simple concept of work experience meaning thereby inculcation of skills and knowledge through creative and productive activities which may result in the students acquiring ability to produce goods and services which are marketable. A creative activity and its productivity in terms of its market value are the two essential characteristics of the concept of work experience. It is hoped that some important values will be inculcated as automatic by-products. The courses have been so designed as to accelerate the realization of educational values, like inculcation of dignity of labour, capacity to work hard, love of aesthetics, innovation and experimentation and greater confidence to face challenges.

Inflexibility

The concept of work experience will in future be more and more sharply defined and the curriculum and courses will be redesigned to realize the educational values in a much more direct and explicit manner.

Long years of teaching-learning process have more or less fixed the contours at various levels of most traditional subjects and the instructional ritual has almost got fixed with little incen-

tive or encouragement to explore unchartered areas. This has generated a rigidity and inflexibility about the whole process which makes routine practices safer and more acceptable to all concerned because of their familiarity. There is left not much scope for innovation on the part of the teachers although some imaginative persons have tried experiments and innovated ideas even in these areas with very fruitful results.

Routinism in any sphere is harmful to real progress, but in education it is more so because it leads to sterility of thinking and offers no way out of the dreary desert sands of dead-habit. Fortunately work experience at least does not suffer from this handicap and offers to teachers full scope for their imaginative experimentation and innovation.

It is hoped that the teachers, while actually implementing the programme, will enrich this simple concept of work experience through their dynamic thinking and practical efforts. They will bear in mind that they are pioneers in this field and can legitimately feel proud that it has fallen to their lot to work out this revolution in educational thinking which seeks to liberate us from centuries of inertia which has kept earning and learning delinked from each other.

This does not, however, mean that the teacher is left entirely on his own without any directions or guidelines. After a good deal of deliberations, a list of about 40 work experiences has been suggested by way of illustration and a student is free to choose any one out of these in accordance with his own aptitude and facilities provided by the school. For most of these suggested work experiences, broad syllabi have also been prepared to make the level of proficiency in each work experience as unambiguous as possible.

No Blind Alley

The teacher has also been given a four-week training in various areas of work experience during the summer recess. About 1,000 teachers, at the rate of one teacher for each affiliated school, have been put through this practical training. For this purpose the facilities and expertise available in our Engineering Colleges,

Technical Teachers Training Institutes, Polytechnics and Regional Colleges of Education have been utilized.

Work experience will be no blind alley for the students because it will be followed by vocational stream in the XI and XII classes. The students doing very well in work experience will have the choice of joining the vocational stream, which will be all integrated programme of academics and vocations. Even at the University level, some Universities are already thinking of starting some vocational courses.

There are obviously two ways of implementing the programme of work experience, either by taking the workshop to the school or by talking the school to the workshop. To begin with, we start with the alternative where most of the factors are under the control of the educational institutions, i.e. work experience

Teachers acquiring workshop skill

will be mostly done in the school itself and that obviously would restrict to some extent the choice of work experience on the part of the schools. The use of community facilities in the neighbourhood or making arrangements with a factory or workshop or productive centre in the neighbourhood is not precluded. In fact the latter has to be encouraged and large scale co-ordination will have to be developed with other agencies concerned with productive activities. This will be a real breakthrough and we shall then be able to take up more sophisticated and more refined work experiences. This may take a little time but this arrangement will have to be worked out because it will not be possible to set up all the necessary workshops in the schools themselves.

As the programme develops, it is certain that such co-ordination will be forthcoming. The success of all educational enterprises depends upon the joint efforts of parents and teachers and work experience needs this joint effort Much more than any other project.