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Value Education for Secular Society
peculiar combination of wide comprehensiveness and effective specialisation will become imperative; they will have to be fused together.
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This is further reinforced by the human crisis created by the need of the development of new faculties of consciousness.
All this explains why we need value education and why we need integral education. In recent trends of thought, we have been presented with the ideal of learning to be and learning to become. It is only when there is a right balance of the development of all our faculties that we can reach and attain the state of selfpossession and self-mastery. We can then experience our true being and discover the secret of our perpetual being. We need to emphasis, therefore, the education of all our parts of being, physical, vital, rational, aesthetic, moral and spiritual. And the development of faculties and capacities of these parts of the being is closely connected with the question of the values that they seek. Values are the ultimate ends that personality seeks to embody, express and fulfil. Corresponding to each capacity, there are specific values. Our physical being seeks the value of health and strength; our vital being seeks the value of harmony and heroism; our rational faculty seeks the value of truth and universality; our moral will seeks the good and the right; our aesthetic sensitivity seeks the value of beauty and joy; and our spiritual faculties seek experiences and realisations of inalienable fraternity, unity and oneness. Integral education, therefore, is the same as integral value education.
This, we may say, is the broad framework of the theme of value education, and we stand in the need of clarifying and discussing implications of this framework. Much work has been done during the last three decades and more. But the issues are difficult. They involve questions of goals of education, contents of education. methods of education. They relate to the goals of society also, and therefore, the climate of the life at home, life in institutions, and life in general. There are also issues connected with parents and teachers, question as to how we look upon the child, how the entire society gets involved in the process of learning and teaching. There is also the issue of developing secular society into learning society. It is for this reason that we need to think more and more rigorously, and to be engaged in the process of value education.
January-March 1993
Jain Education International
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