Triveni Journal

1927 | 11,233,916 words

Triveni is a journal dedicated to ancient Indian culture, history, philosophy, art, spirituality, music and all sorts of literature. Triveni was founded at Madras in 1927 and since that time various authors have donated their creativity in the form of articles, covering many aspects of public life....

Triple Stream

I. V. Chalapati Rao

Editorial

THE EDUCATIONAL SCENE
NIAGARA OF REPORTS AND SAHARA OF ACTION

Whenever there is a change of Government or Ministry at the Centre or the States, new policies are formulated and pronouncements made by the authorities imbued with a new zeal. Commissions and Committees are appointed to introduce reforms and remedy the defects in the education system. This process goes on and on to the end of the book.

Everyone says that the standards have fallen and are still falling. When were the standards admitted to be high? Commissions after commission made adverse comments on the existing system. Before Independence the Report of the Indian Education Committee of 1882 referred to the steep decline in standards. It commented: “Neither the reform of the curriculum nor the passage of time produced the academic standards.” Even after a few decades, things did not change because of which we find stringent criticism by Pedler, the then Director of Public Instruction of Bengal. He said, “It is my considered opinion that the quality of higher education had progressively deteriorated”. After the Sadler Commission Report (1904), Lord Curzon introduced some reforms. In his speech justifying the reforms he made a carping comment on “the state into which University education had fallen in India”. He made pointed reference to “the rush of immature striplings to our Indian Universities not to learn but to earn”, multiplicity of colleges without regard to any criterion “either of necessity or of merit” and “the curse of examination”, He added “India had been bartering her intellectual heritage for the proverbial mess of pottage”. Is it diagnosis or prognosis?

Those were the days when Universities and Colleges were lengthened shadows of their vice-­chancellors and principals who stood head and shoulders above their colleagues in scholarship. Asutosh Mukherji, Madan Mohan Malaviya, Dr. Radha Krishnan, Sir C.R. Reddy, Dr. Lakshmana Swamy Mudaliar, Sir R. Venkataratnam Naidu were some of the distinguished educationists. Even among the college principals there were outstanding men - a Wilson, a Miller and a Rudra who were intellectually and ethically on par with Vice­ chancellors. Today we have of course a happy-go-lucky new brood of vice-­chancellors who soar above the heads of their seniors and, superiors through political leverage. These are the position leaders who are readily received by the public and hailed by the media as eminent educationists. Even in those good old days, there was an outcry against falling standards! Sir Asutosh Mukherji himself lamented: “The ebb-­tide of higher education has been reached”. In 1928: Hartog Committee observed” The command of English language is still weakening”, which meant that it has already declined earlier!

After the advent of Independence the Government of India appointed the Radhakrishnan Commission (1947-48) consisting of eminent educationists (national and inter-national) to make improvements to suit present and future requirements of the country. The Commission redefined and vivified the aims and, objects of University education and made very useful recommendations of all-time applicability. One who reads the Report will not fail to recognise its practical nature. There is nothing in the Reports of the subsequent Commissions that is not already present in that Report. The Report even stated “Our Universities must be released from the control of politics.”

It is an open secret that the rumpus on the campuses of universities today is due to politicisation of the centres of learning. Thereby hangs a tale. That can wait. The Report prescribed the qualifications of the teachers, discussed their role and explained the paramount importance of their professional development in the fields of teaching as well as research.

In 1968, the Government thought it necessary to appoint another high profile Commission under the Chairmanship of Dr. Q. S. Kothari. Its comment was “The present system of education which was designed to meet the needs of an imperial administration set up by a feudal and traditional society will need radical changes, if it is to meet the purposes of modernizing a democratic and socialistic society (Chapter I, 17)”. Does it not imply that during the last 16 years after Independence, little was done to change the so-called feudal character of the system.

The Kothari Commission, however, was good enough to say “Many of the things we say here have been said before, notably by the University Education Commission of 1948-49. The real need is action.” Manifestly, it is a complaint that the Government took no action to implement the previous recommendations.

Then came the National Education Policy Document of 1986, which admits that the recommendations of the Kothari Commission were included in the 1968 policy but “did not get translated into a detailed strategy of implementation”. In other words, what was lacking all along was implementation.

The New Education Policy Document contains an over-view of the status of education and points to the direction of future initiatives. The New Education Policy commented: “A preponderant majority are coming out of the educational institutions with very little capacity of self-study, poor language and Communication skill, a highly limited world view and hardly basic range of social and national responsibility”. “Teacher training is not planned and organised to develop the spirit of enquiry, initiative, and linguistic skills for effective speaking and learning”. Obviously, education is still at the cross roads because of “resource constraints”, resistance to “institutional change and lack of political will. Again when there was a change in Government at the Centre, Acharya Ramamurthy committee was appointed in 1990 to present its own Report. It was a sort of mid-course review of the New Education Policy. The Report made a significant observation:

“It has been clearly within the perception of the Committee that much of what is contained in its Report has already been dealt with by Commissions and Committees which were called upon to go into educational policy from time to time from the 19th century onward.” Implementation was the only problem. Therefore the Ramamurthy Committee decided to suggest “possible alternative modalities of implementation”. But the same fate of the earlier Reports has overtaken these alternative modalities!

As there was again a change of Government, another Committee was appointed under the chairmanship of Sri N. Janardhana Reddy, a chief minister. Thus during these 48 years of independence, the country has witnessed a bumper crop of Commissions and Committees which have produced voluminous reports which are gathering dust in the lockers of the bureacrats. It is clearly a case of Niagara of reports on educational reforms and Sahara of action.

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