Book Title: Mahavira Jain Vidyalaya Rajat Jayanti Mahotsava
Author(s): Mahavir Jain Vidyalaya Mumbai
Publisher: Mahavir Jain Vidyalay
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THE REMAKING OF EDUCATION
By
M. T. VYAS, M.A. EDUCATION (Lond.),
PRINCIPAL, NEW ERA SCHOOL, BOMBAY.
That the present system of education is entirely defective and unsuited to the growing life in the country is a truth that has come to be accepted by all. Where we seem to differ is only in analysing the causes of this malady and defining the methods of its cure.
The purpose of education should be to fit the child for life. It should equip him not only to pursue his personal life but to make him aware of his duties to the community and of his share in the making of the social, economic and cultural life of the nation. Viewed from this point of view, our present system of education is not only grievously unsuited but alarmingly reactionary.
Education does not touch very nearly three-quarters of the population of this country. And where it does touch, it is a disruptive rather than cohesive force. Education does not touch the village life. It alienates village children: from their surroundings and leaves them in the void. The village arithmetic deals with pounds, shillings, and tons rather than their everyday coins and weights. The history he is taught, is never related to that of his own district. The geography he is compelled to imbibe, does not give him any knowledge of his immediate surroundings. It is Macaulay's idea of education of turning out cheaper clerks that has reached the smallest village school and with such success, that the ambition of a village boy is to be a mere hack of a clerk with no initiative or independence rather than follow an independent profession, even if it were to pay more. How many sad cases do we come across of graduates possessing lands in their own villages and yet preferring to live a life of servile drudgery as petty clerks or police men.
Education to-day emphasises the wrong values, and in a rapidly changing social order creates the "wrong men". It served its own purpose till now to create through education a set of “ Yes" men, who meekly aquiesced in the existing order of things. To-day the world about us is rapidly changing. Both national and international lives are making new demands on the citizens. A new co-operative social order has to be built up out of the ruins of our village
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