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Education
Towards good citizenship
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Values cannot be forced, even if conveyed with good intentions. No real integration or internalisation of valuees can be achieved unless the learner agrees with it. Communication is the key in this. This is one tradition we lack in India, but it can be developed with the cooperation of all.
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WHAT TYPE of education is needed to empower citizens to become agents of change for better world societies? This was an issue before delegates at the eighth UNESCO-Asia Pacific Programme of Education Innovation for Development (APEID) held at Bangkok, Thailand, recently. In a world grappling with the challenges posted by intolerance and fundamentalism, especially India, where the attack on Parliament, Godhra and its aftermath changed perceptions about social-cohesion forever, the meaning of the term "citizenship education" assumes particular importance.
The current emphasis on values in education as articulated in the National Council for Educational Research and Training (NCERT) National Curriculum Framework for School Education-2000 (NCFSE) is a product of many years of contemplation into the sad degeneration of society into hedonism, corruption and violence even as poverty, inequity, injustice and the environment continue to send warning signals.
How can we prepare our future generations to cope with the challenges and fast changing realities of today and tomorrow? How can we develop citizens who can bring about the transformation of this culture of violence, intolerance and greed to one of peace, non-violence and respect for one another? These are not going to be achieved with the click of a finger. There is no ready-made solution waiting to be adopted. In fact the debate in India over value education, which has rankled for the past two years, shows how easily political rhetoric can overtake the best of the professional and academic intentions.
The NCERT had proposed that India, being home to people of many faiths, should look to its own, rich spiritual tradition to find the ways to grapple with contemporary problems — look back into the future as it were. The Jesuit educationist, Father Herman Castelinio has pointed out that the need for inter-faith education has been recognised for nearly five decades by several education commissions, but never taken seriously.
In 1999, the government took the laudable step of identifying the strategies to strengthen the Fundamental Duties of Citizens, which formed a little known chapter in our national Constitution. The culmination of these was the enshrinement of education as a Fundament Right, which proves beyond doubt that India was well aware that the ideal type of citizen will be shaped by an educational paradigm.
Our national goal of striking unity in diversity must be realised through the approaches we follow in our educational policies, programmes and practices and their implementation in our schools.
Value education, as envisaged by the NCFSE, is not to be a structured process. We subscribe to an advocacy-pedagogy route in which the educator is attuned to the process of learning. At the same time it demands the teacher's sensitivity to opportunities for teaching which result from the meaningful interaction between the educator and the learner and also among the learners themselves. There is a popular misconception — which perhaps led to the postponement of value education instruction in India for decades — that values are "better caught than taught". In reality however, values are both caught and taught.
The learning does not solely come from the teacher but the educator for the child is both the teacher and his peer group. In this light, the teacher is more of a guide and facilitator, and indeed, the true partner in learning. The success of the valuing process, according to contemporary educationists, lies in encouraging the learner to ask the "Why" and "What for" at the right times. This tendency checks the proliferation of blind faith. For instance, it is quite a scientific achievement to be able to clone animals. But society needs to question what is the need for this? Valuing, therefore, guarantees a humanism that otherwise may sadly be lost in the excitement of new discoveries.
So, value education is not simply the heart of education, but also the education of the heart. It is a necessary component of holistic citizenship education. The NCFSE does not recommend mere teaching about values but rather learning how to value, how to bring knowledge into the deeper level of understanding and insights. The holistic learning experience aims at the internalisation of values by the learner and translating them into their behaviour.
A total learning process is therefore envisaged. It is time for decision makers and professionals in the field of education to lead in the total effort of designing and implementing new and more effective ways of preparing our future citizens and future leaders into the creation of better societies. Our priority should be to translate the valuable lessons from our spiritual texts — the Gita, Koran, Bible and Guru Granth Sahib — to transform the growing culture of violence, greed and intolerance into one of peaceful co-existence.
Now, that is hardly achieved without designing a concrete yet flexible programme or course complete with activities so that each school can fulfil its mission of creating "civic capacities". The NCERT has already started a nation-wide consultation process and has involved eminent scholars from varied religious and institutional backgrounds. Their valued inputs led to the decision to develop a Handbook for Schools on Strategies of Value Implementation which hopefully would keep those responsible for the selection and development of instructional material for inclusion in the schoolbooks they may think of developing. Simultaneously, NCERT's National Resource Centre for Value Education has started several projects for independent research and innovations in Value Education in collaboration with several institutions and organisations.
Values cannot be forced, even if conveyed with good intentions. No real integration or internalisation of a value can be achieved unless the learner agrees with it. Communication is the key in this. This is one tradition we lack in India, but it can be developed with the cooperation of all. In value education, more than in the academics, educators will never be able to impose their values. Rather, they must circulate in the community of the learner and pass on, through discipline, the fine humanism of respecting others in the same manner that one expects to be respected in return. As this climate of respect surrounds the learners, they automatically imbibe an attitude of tolerance towards their fellow men.
J. S. RAJPUT
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