Kesarimalji Surana Abhinandan Granth

Author(s): Nathmal Tatia, Dev Kothari
Publisher: Kesarimalji Surana Abhinandan Granth Prakashan Samiti

Page 1280

Community Education in National Perspective
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of environmental conditions. Hence, a positive effort has to be made to ensure the integration of traditional and contemporary elements with formal and non-formal education.
Community service and participation in constructive and socially useful work should be implied in the national educational programme at all stages to foster self-reliance and the dignity of labour. Moral education should form part of the content through inter-related curricular and co-curricular programmes. Teachers and institutions should bear the entire responsibility.
POLICY AND PROGRAMME (a) Policy-An ideal system of educational policy should enable individuals to learn and develop to the fullest their physical and intellectual potentiality and promote their awareness of social and human values so that dynamic-status-quo is created in the main stream of the national life. To achieve this, the content of educational curriculum needs to be modified to suit changing times and needs of the hour. Emphasis should be shifted from teaching to learning and the role of the teacher becomes more crucial.
The system must endeavour to narrow the gulf between the educated classes and the masses, and the feeling of superiority and inferiority should be gradually eliminated. A student should be permitted to choose his own course and choose his own time.
Highest priority must be given to free education for all upto the age of fourteen, as laid down in the directive principles of the Constitution. It should be general and not specialised. The accent on elementary education should centre round the totality of personality of an individual.
Besides formal subjects of a curriculum, the system should lay stress on useful community service and it should incorporate also agriculture or horticulture and vocational activity. Information on family planning, health and nutrition, child and mother care should be widely disseminated. This would comprise the development content of community education.
The central link in the system is secondary education which possesses backward and forword linkages, with elementary and college education respectively. Secondary education has to be so structured that by dint of his acquired knowledge and skill, he can enter life's career with a wider choice and mobility. Thus, there is a need for change in the approach to the learning process with creative accent at all levels in the educational policy of the nation.
(b) Programme - Besides formal education, the non-formal education comprises the following :
(i) National Adult Education (ii) Farmers' functional literacy (iii) Social education and so on.
To develop a realistic attitude towards work and poster a keener sense of adult responsibility, a vital curriculum is deemed necessary.
An adult education programme was taken up by the Janata Government on the 5th April 1977 in the Parliament. It was indeed a bold and massive programme, which was launched on the 2nd October 1978. It was envisaged that an adult education centre would prove to be a place of reform, training, earning and learning campus. A programme so designed should motivate the people for betterment of life. The process is liable to revive popular initiative for national upsurge. The phasing of the programme would last from 1978-79 to 1933-84 and the
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