Para Português Ler

Education system in India

On the one side Indians are considered as the proud owner of glorious education system in the past and on the other side we the same Indian are considered as one of the nations with poorest education structure in the world -with millions of illiterates in the country- even poorer than the countries those stands nowhere near us in the development in the last few years. On the other hand various other countries are amazed by the quality of the human resources that the Indian education system has produced. There was a time when India’s education system was considered as the best in the world and followed and adored by renowned scholars from every part of the world. But with the time this glorious system lost its luster and a time came when it hit its lowest ebb. There may be varied reasons behind this continued and long decline in the quality of education system in India. One of the prominent reasons was the social structure of the Indian society. Like Women and people of lower castes were not considered good enough to be educated thus denied the right to educate themselves and this continued for centuries altogether till eighteenth century. It was only in the middle of the eighteenth century with the spread of Jainism, Buddhism, Bhakti and Sufi movements did some liberating effects on the condition of the women and lower caste people known as sudra started to appears. But in the real sense it was the English language and the reformation movements of the 19th century that had the most liberating effect in pre-independent India. Although there was no real change in the education system or level of education in the India but certainly there started a thought process to check this menace of illiteracy. So it is the Britishers that can be credited for bringing a revolution in the Indian education system.

According to the constitution of Indian Republic Education falls under the control of both the central government and the states, with some responsibilities lying with the centre and the state having autonomy for other.At the time of independence the Government of India was dealing with so many critical issues like union of states to mother land, peace in the troubled area, poverty and increasing population and shattered economic condition. In all this chaos government of India give priority to the development of the education as this was seen as one of the main cause of the some other evils of the society. Main impediment in this was considered to be indiscrimination in the society on the basis of caste and creed. So to remove this evil strict laws were made and implemented. Special emphasis was started to be given to girl children education. So many schemes were started so that there will not be any discrimination as far as imparting education to the girl child is concerned.

With the 86th constitutional amendment Indian Government has made elementary education a fundamental right for the children of the age group- 6 to 14.

According to the 2001 census, the total literacy rate in India is 65.38%. The female literacy rate is only 54.16%. The gap between rural and urban literacy rate is also very significant in India. This is evident from the fact that only 59% of rural population is literate as against 80% (approx) urban population according to the 2001 census.

Education is being given utmost priority by both the state and Centre government of the country in the present past. Every effort is being done to organize the education system in India to tackle all ready grown up illiteracy rate of the Indian population for this the central government of India formulated the National Policy in Education (NPE) in 1986 and also re-enforced the Programme of Action (POA) in 1986. The central government initiated several measures like setting up of Navodaya Vidyalaya selective schools in every district, advances in female education, inter-disciplinary research and establishment of open universities. India’s NPE also contains the National System of Education, which ensures some uniformity while taking into account regional education needs. The NPE also stresses on higher spending on education, envisaging a budget of more than 6% of the overall national budget.

]]>

The present educational system in India is mainly divided into the following few categories according to the level of the education.

This is the first step of the ladder of education in the education system of India. The Indian government lays much emphasis on the foundation of education ie. Primary education up to the age of fourteen years. Besides putting a ban on child labor in order to ensure that the children do not enter unsafe working conditions. To universalize primary education District Primary Education Programme (DPEP) was launched in 1994 founded by central and state governments in 85% -15%of The DPEP with the support of UNICEF has opened approx 1,60,000 new schools delivering alternative education to approximately 3.5 million children. Significant improvement in staffing and enrollment of girls has been made as a part of this scheme. In spite of all these efforts overall primary school conditions in India as a whole continued to remain lag behind internationally due to understaffing coupled with lack of developed infrastructure and sufficient financing.

The National Policy on Education (NPE), 1986, has provided for environment awareness, science and technology education, and introduction of traditional elements such as meditation and yoga into the Indian secondary school system. Another feature of India’s secondary school system is its emphasis on profession based vocational training to help students attain skills for finding a vocation of his/her choosing.

A special Integrated Education for Disabled Children (IEDC) programme was started in 1974. The Kendriya Vidyalaya project was started for the benefits of the children of the employees of the central government of India, who are distributed throughout the country.

Well organized main governing body at the tertiary level is the University Grants Commission (India)
Third largest in the world
20 central universities
215 state universities
100 deemed universities
5 institutions established and functioning under the State Act
16000 colleges, including 1800 exclusive women’s colleges
1200 engineering colleges
with an estimated 30000 graduates employed in the United States as of 2006
7 Indian Institutes of Technology (IITs), have been globally acclaimed for their standard of education.

This number will soon inflate as the setting up of 30 more central universities, 8 new IITs, 7 IIMs and 5 new Indian Institutes of Science are now proposed.

Above data is just the one side of the coin showing only the rosy picture of the state of affairs in the tertiary education system of India but the truth lies in the fact that our university system is still in the state of despair as more then 90 percent of our higher educational institutions are considered to be below par on the quality scale. The internal system of the universities system is marred with the political, caste and communal considerations on the cost of education of the students. And this truth is applicable on all the institution baring a few like IIT’s and IIM’s who are able to sustain their sanctity and established them self on the world map as one of the best. But the overall scenario cannot be considered rosy as it appears from the numbers given above.

In order to reduce the gap caused by the earlier socio-economic condition prevailing in the Indian society the government of India took some measures. These measures are being taken to just reduce the disparities in the various sections of the Indian society so that we can progress as a whole rather then different factions of the same society. This is being done as education is considered to be a means for bringing socio- economic transformation in a society, various measures are being taken to enhance the access of education to the marginalized sections of the society. One such measure is the introduction of the reservation system in the institutes of higher education. Under the present law, 7.5% seats in the higher educational institutes are reserved for the scheduled tribes, 15% for scheduled castes and 27% for the non creamy layers of the Other Backward Classes (OBCs). Under the Indian constitution, various minority groups can also set up their own educational institutes. Efforts are also being taken to improve the access to higher education among the women of India by setting up various educational institutes exclusively for them or reserving seats in the already existing institutes. The growing acceptance of distance learning courses and expansion of the Open University system is also contributing a lot in the democratization of higher education in India.

Taking other co-related social problems in view like poverty, the ever increasing population, old traditional values etc to find any conclusion on the progress of the Independent India on the education front as a hole appears to be a mounting task. But if we take the progress on this front of other countries like china having similar problems and hurdles as we are facing we can conclude that despite all the efforts to develop the education system in India, access, quality of education in India continue to haunt the policy makers till this date. This may mainly been due to the widespread poverty and various prejudices. But this is not the only cause of the shamble in the education system after so many efforts. This mystery has to be unrevealed by the policy makers by their sincere efforts to achieve this goal of education for all. However, the renewed emphasis in the education sector in the 11th five year plan and increased expenditure in both primary and higher education can act as a catalyst for the Indian education system.

Source: ArticlesBase.com

Challenges in Introducing Value Education at Higher Education in India

Dr.R.Murali

Head

Department of Philosophy

The Madura College(Autonomous)

Madurai-11

Murali_phil@hotamil.com

Value Education is the much debated and discussed subject in the plethora of education in India. Of course it is true that the main purpose of any education will go with Value orientation. More concentration on Value education has been given at the primary and secondary level of school education than in higher education in India. Values could be effectively imparted to the young minds rather than to the matured ones. It may be the important reason for this prime importance given at the school level. There are so many modules designed with the help of agencies like NCERT and others for effectively imparting the value education to the school students. In this context, many innovative educational practices are being identified by the experts. Good number of experiments and studies are being conducted in the recent days on the effectiveness of teaching value education at school level. Some schools have very innovative and radical course designs to impart the values.

Effective teaching practices in imparting value education ranges from story telling, exhibitions, skits, one act play and group discussions to various other formats. New methods have been evolved by educationists to create an effective learning sphere. The usage of electronic gadgets also gains importance in the teaching-learning practices of value education. But at the higher education level, due to various reasons, the importance given to value education is not as much as it is given at the school level. The curriculum and the teaching methods also could be subjected to scrutiny. It is true that colleges are meant for a kind of specialization in some field of education. But in the Indian social context, the youth require direction and counseling at this stage. They have been exposed to various challenges at this stage which demands the intervention of educationists for his/her betterment. His/her character building also strengthens at this juncture. Students’ perception on various life factors and events are getting shaped at this stage. On the whole they evolve their own philosophy of life. Their sensitivity and knowledge are getting direction at this stage. Hence, an effective value orientation becomes inevitable to the students of colleges. Keeping this requirement in mind, States like Tamilnadu introduced a compulsory paper/course on value education to undergraduate students of all colleges in the State under the choice based credit system.  Though this kind of effort is made with the good intention of imparting values to the youth, many limitations in bringing out the expected outcome could be identified.

The problem mainly begins with the definition of values. Defining the term ‘value’ poses a challenge to all scholars. The term value is loaded with varieties of meaning. Each meaning reflects its own philosophical position. Generally the term value is spontaneously associated with religious values. It is believed by many Indians that values are nothing but the religious and spiritual guiding principles of life. Hence, it is supposed  that the path is already been laid for the life journey. But in the context of modernity and modernism there rises a fundamental question of whether value education is required at all in a modern state.  There are those who argue that modern life is based on science and technology, and both are value neutral. They view that the values are bugbear held out by people living in the past, glued to outdated religious principles that have no relevance to the 21st century. At this point, there is also another group of modernist who propagate the necessity of value education at learning centres in order to safe guard the democratic state and its values. The values they wish to cultivate are modern secular values such as honesty, respect to other, equality, collectivity, democracy, respecting the human rights, sharing equal space in the public sphere and so on. These values are considered as the products of enlightenment period. Hence, four positions could be arrived at on the basis of the above understanding. The are:

There are religious values which are very much essential for every one and must be included in the curriculum.
The religious values should not find place in the educational system. They may operate at the private sphere.
There are non-religious secular values and they must find space in the education.
There is no need for teaching value education in the academics because they cannot be cultivated through formal learning and such value cultivation will make the individual biased.

In consequence to these positions, following questions arouse.

Whether value education should find place in the educational system?
If it is required, then what sort of values should be given preference in the curriculum?
What is the importance to be given to the religious values which are primarily developed on the basis of scriptures?
Can modern values alone are sufficient enough or is there any possibility of blending the values of modernity with religious values?
If religious values are to be given importance in the curriculum, which religion will find prime place? If there are contradictory propagation on a single virtue by two religions, then how are they to be handled?
Similarly religions differ on the practices also. Right from eating patterns, dress mode, marriage systems, war tactics, killing, punishments to various other aspects, religions differ on their outlook. In this situation, what sort of perceptions need to be taught?

]]>

Besides these questions, another billion dollar question would be raised on the methodology of effectively imparting those values. Then again as it is mentioned earlier, the school education can very well include this education easily because the system itself is advantageous for it to accommodate. But at the college level, the system finds it very difficult to work out.  So this study could analyse the theoretical problems relating to the identification of values to be included in the curriculum at the one side and the problem of effective designing of the curriculum and imparting those values on the other side.

II

The necessity for imparting values to the students of all levels has been felt by everyone. The world today is facing unprecedented socio-political and economic challenges. Problems of life are becoming increasingly intense and complex. Traditional values are decentered. ‘An environment of strife pervades all countries and broken homes have become common. An insatiable hunger for money and power, leads most of people to tension and absence  of peace of mind and all kinds of physical and mental ailments have become common place” 1. In the present day context of frequent and often violent social upheavals, we have to look at the problem of restlessness of the youth, their frustration born out of futility of their search for meaning of life and the purpose for which they are living, often leading to evil and wickedness. This calls for a new approach to, and a new vision of education. It is obviously felt that the present educational system promotes rat race and keep the student community in a sense of insecurity. Educational institutions have become the pressure cookers building pressures in the minds of youth. Also a loft sided educational pattern which insists on instrumental and technical rationality for the successful life in terms of gaining money and power has invaded the educational system of India. The person who is deemed to be unfit for this survival race becomes disqualified and ineligible to live in this market economy based life.    The spate of industrialization and economic growth in developed nations has brought about a perceptible change in this scenario. And developing countries including India are feeling the ripple effects of this development. Values earlier considered essential by all societies have been eroded and have given way to unethical practices around the globe. Where honesty and integrity were loved and appreciated, greed, corruption and red tapism have come in, bringing in their wake, unethical responses which have pervaded all walks of life and are thwarting efforts of a few enlightened individuals to promote value based society.2 Hence, implementation of well structured education is the only solution available with all states. With growing divisive forces, narrow parochialism, separatist tendencies on the one hand and considerable fall in moral, social, ethical and national values both in personal and public life on the other, the need for promoting effective programmes of value orientation in education has assumed great urgency. Development of human values through education is now routinely seen as a task of national importance. Value education though supposes to be the part and parcel of the regular education, due to the market influences, it could not be so. Hence, it has become an inevitable need to include an exclusive curriculum for value education at all levels.

Now the next question would be about the nature of value education. What sort of values should be given preference in the curriculum is the prime problem in the introduction of value education. This problem surfaces because we can find varieties of values prescribed on the basis of various scriptures and theories. Sometimes they are contradictory to each other. This issue has been thoroughly discussed earlier. But the solution to the problem of the nature of value education is primarily dependent on the social conditions that prevail in the state. There need not be an imported value educational pattern to be prescribed in India. The burning social issues would demand the required value education.  Though India is considered to be the land of divinity and wisdom, the modern value system throws challenges to the ancient value pattern. Right from the Gurkula pattern to the varna ashrama values, all values are under scrutiny by modern rationality. Hence, the relevance of the golden values prescribed by the then society is questionable in the present situation. On the other hand, the so called modern values which have been listed earlier also subjected to criticism by philosophers like post modernists. They question the very nature of the rationality of the enlightenment period. Because critics of modernity strongly declare that the modern rationality is the reason for the deterioration of human concern in the world and they paved the way for inhuman killing and escalation of values. The reason of the modernism is considered as the root of power politics which leads to inhuman behaviour of the power system, according to them. Hence the modern values like democracy, civil rights, environmental ethics, professional ethics, discipline and all such values are found useless in bringing harmony in the society. The values like discipline, tolerance, peace bears the negative connotation in this context. Hence, what sort of modern values are to be included in the curriculum is a challenge thrown towards the educationists. At one side the fanatic  and fundamentalist features of religious values and on the other side the modern values based on the market economy and other factors are to be excluded and a well balanced curriculum with genuine worthy values suitable to the society has to be identified and included in the educational system. In this context, it becomes obvious that there cannot be any universal pattern of values to be prescribed in the system.   When a suitable blend of religious and modern values is to be done, the designing of such course demands an unbiased, scrupulous, intelligent approach on the part of the academician who designs such course. Thus the spiritual values of sensitizing the youth for happy world and rational values for a just world are very much required. Religious values can be taken but not with the label of any particular religion, democratic values are to be included but not with its dogmatic inhuman approach. Thus there need a perfect blend of both. This is the real challenge thrown to the Indian academicians.

After the identification of these values, they need to be inculcated not to be informed to the students. Mostly listing the values is done very easily, but imparting them effectively requires genuine spirit and innovative educational practices. In the Vedic period, the gurukula system prevailed in which the student has to thoroughly undergo a pattern life with the guru shishya hierarchy. Whatever the guru declares are the values of life. But in the modern context, which is supposed to be the democratic sphere, a sense of equality and freedom has to prevail the learning situation. Also the values identified cannot be preached on the basis of the religious faiths. So the teacher has to find effective working module to internalize the values in the minds of the youth. The teachers’ understanding about the values prescribed and his/her commitment in imparting them also play a crucial role here. How to sensitize the teacher before carrying the values to the students is also a challenge to the educationists. The value education class room, if it is dealt with full seriousness and sincerity would be very interesting and challenging sphere for students and teachers. At times they need to sail at the same level with the students. The hierarchy may get disappeared. Value education demands a total responsibility from the teachers. They become more accountable. On the other side, a teacher who is committed to a set of values would always like to preach and impose them on the young minds. That extreme should also to be avoided with a balance of mind. Value education cannot be done by just delivering lectures and screening films. It requires a strong interaction between the students and the society.  A lot could be experimented at this sphere. For which the supreme value ‘integrity’ is expected from the educator.

It is observed that many modules of teaching values have been designed and tested. Some are seemed to be very effective. In Tamilnadu, especially in aided colleges, with all good intention the government has introduced the value education as a compulsory scheme at the undergraduate level. But each university has its own syllabus for the same. The scrutiny of those syllabi also reveals a lot of variations in conceiving the value education. In some universities, some religion based institutions are given the responsibility of designing and even carrying out the course. Similarly the teachers who have not been exposed to any such type of training in value education are given the responsibility of teaching values. The introduction of value education for all under graduate courses is done at the cost of a core paper of that course. The teachers who have been handling their hardcore subject papers had to meet the shortage of workload due to this programme and to solve this problem, they have been entrusted with the job of teaching value education paper. This is done with the aim of avoiding the workload problem of existing teachers. The most valuable and sensitive part of education has been made like a mechanical dogmatic part. At this juncture, the fate of value education at the college level could be imagined. How to solve this issue is again a challenge to the educationists of Tamilnadu. The same fate could be observed in many other states of India. Hence, two important problems surfaces here, one at the syllabus level and the other at the teaching level. As it is discussed earlier the syllabus could be designed by way of paying attention to all aspects but imparting the same requires not only innovative teaching methods, but also innovative training method of the educators. It is as good as training the driver to drive the car; the teacher needs to be trained in imparting the values. The technical education employs teachers with sound knowledge in the subject, similarly it is essential to have teachers with sound mind and creative teaching skill to teach value education. Value education is definitely not to be dealt with compartmentalization but it should be taken as a part of the whole educational system. As Nietzsche puts it, the society requires masters to create and impart values, not the slaves who accept all the values imposed on them without any critical understanding.

If education fails to impart necessary values to its citizens, it will definitely have a telling effect on the society. All efforts to bring just and peace in the world will become futile if proper value education is not imparted.

Kireet Joshi, Philosophy of  Value Oriented Education Theory and Practice, ICPR

Publications, New Delhi,p.217.

2.   Ibid., p.218.

Source: ArticlesBase.com