POSITION PAPER

NATIONAL FOCUS GROUP

ON

AIMS OF EDUCATION

2.1

POSITION PAPER

NATIONAL FOCUS GROUP

ON

AIMS OF EDUCATION

2.1

First EditionMach 2006 Chaitra 1928

ReprintedDecember 2006 Pausa 1928

PD 5T BS

© National Council of EducationalResearch and Training, 2006

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Prof. Mrinal Miri (Chairperson)Vice ChancellorNorth Eastern Hill UniversityP.O. NEHU, Mawkynroh UmshingShillong – 793 022, Meghalaya

Dr. Sharada JainDirector, Sandhan (Society ofEducation & Development)C-196, Baan Marg, Tilak NagarJaipur – 302 004, Rajasthan

Prof. C. Seshadri1391, C&D BlockPoorna Dristhi Road, 1st CrossKuvempunagerMysore – 570023Karnataka

Prof. P.R. Nair152 - I Stage, I BlockKoramangalaBangalore – 560 034, Karnataka

Prof. Roop Rekha VermaHon. DirectorInstitute of Women StudiesLucknow UniversityLucknow – 226 007Uttar Pradesh

MEMBERS OF NATIONAL FOCUS GROUP ON

AIMS OF EDUCATION

Dr. Jayshree MathurCentral Institute of Education (CIE)33, Chhatra MargDelhi UniversityDelhi – 110 007

Prof. Sebak TripathyPrincipalDr. P.M. Institute of Advanced Studiesin Education (IASE)SambalpurOrissa – 768 001

Dr. Gurveen KaurPrincipal & Secretary, Centre for LearningC-128, AWHO-Ved ViharSubhashnagar, Secunderabad – 500 015Andhra Pradesh

Prof. Satya P. GautamProfessor & ChairpersonCentre for PhilosophySchool of Social SciencesJawaharlal Nehru UniversityNew Mehrauli RoadNew Delhi – 110 067

Dr. P. Kilem SunglaPrincipalNagaland College of Teacher EducationPost Box No. 108Kohima – 797 001, Nagaland

v

Dr. Aarti SrivastavaFaculty of EducationBanaras Hindu UniversityKamachha, VaranasiUttar Pradesh

Dr. R.K. MujooDepartment of EducationAssam UniversityDargakoua, Silchar – 788 011Assam

Dr. Utpala Konwar ( Member Secretary )OSD, NERIE (NCERT)Laitumukhra, Shillong – 793 003Meghalaya

InviteesProf. C.S. NagarajuHeadDepartment of Educational Research and PolicyPerspectives (DERPP)NCERT, New Delhi – 110 016

Dr. S. YadavReader in EnglishNorth-East Regional Institute of Education(NERIE)Shillong – 793 003Meghalaya

CONTENTS

Members of National Focus Group on Aims of Education . . . v

1. INTRODUCTION ...1

2. THE BACKGROUND ...1

3. AIMS OF EDUCATION ...2

4. SOME IMPLICATIONS FOR PEDAGOGY AND EVALUATION ...5

Annexure: Language, Tradition and Rationality...7

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1. INTRODUCTION

For a fairly long time now, we have been engaged inthe great task of educating the children of India, anindependent nation with a rich variegated history,extraordinarily complex cultural diversity, andcommitment to democratic values and generalwell-being. Given the enormity and importance of thistask, it is necessary that we create occasions from timeto time to sit back collectively and ask ourselves, ‘Whatare we doing in our engagement with this task? Is therea need to ask ourselves afresh some of the basicquestions such as what ought to be the purpose ofeducation?’ The constitution of the Focus Group onthe Aims of Education is perhaps meant to providesuch an occasion.

If we look at what the school education systemhas done in the last decades, perhaps we have much tobe satisfied with. Products of this system have goneon to make their mark in diverse fields of national andinternational life. But there is also a deep disquiet aboutseveral aspects of our educational system, particularlythe school system. The disquiet springs from a varietyof factors, such as:

(a) the school system has come to be characterizedwith a kind of inflexibility that makes it verydifficult to breathe fresh life into it;

(b) learning for children seems to have become asort of isolated and perfunctory activity whichthey are unable to connect in any organic orvital way with the rest of their life;

(c) education has come to be perceived moreand more as a means of ensuring the future‘well-being’ of students (i.e., their place insociety and their economic status whichguarantees this place)—this has led to a neglectof children’s present abilities and difficulties,

which could deprive them of a quality of lifemuch richer in content than that the educationsystem prepares them for;

(d) what is presented and transmitted asknowledge in schools leaves out vitalconstituents of man’s epistemic enterprise; and

(e) schools promote a regime of thought whichdiscourages thinking and precludes new andsurprising insights.

2. THE BACKGROUND

Education, of course, is not a modern practice, althoughit may be claimed that there is a modern way ofpractising it. So far as we assume it to be a system ofteaching and learning, all traditional communities havedevised both formal and informal ways of learningand teaching. The aim of such learning and teachinghas primarily been to induct the child and the adolescentinto the way of life of the community.

The most amazing bit of learning that takes placein very early childhood is learning to wield the languageof the community, i.e., the native language of the child.One important aspect of this process is that there isnot much of deliberate, organized teaching here. It ismore a process of fairly unselfconscious entry into aspecific world, the world of the community. St.Augustine said a long time ago that language lights upthe world for us. And we might add that every languagelights up the world in its own specific way. For a child,the process of learning its native language is almostlike a particular world gradually taking a distinctive shapewithin its ‘field of vision’. Learning one’s native languagealso involves learning to distinguish between the rightand the wrong, the truth and the untruth, of one’s nativecommunity. [In view of the great importance oflanguage for education, we have appended a separate

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note on language to this report.]One main educational concern of traditional

communities was the transmission of various skills,especially those related to the economic life of thecommunity: agriculture, hunting, fishing, and caring forits environment—its trees, animals, birds, water bodies,etc. But great emphasis was also placed on transmittingskills related to the pursuit of the community’s specificdesires and aspirations—broadly and perhapsmisleadingly classified as ‘aesthetic’ and ‘spiritual’—whichhave to do with giving expression to what might becalled the community’s ‘inner’ life. These skills includemusic, crafts, painting or drawing pictures, carving,pottery, creating various artefacts, which may be useful,but, very importantly, have this other expressive aspect.

A community traditionally assumes a degree ofcontinuity for itself—continuity of its constituentstructures of human relationships, which give it, to alarge extent, its identity and meaning. Given thisassumption, the aims of education within what might,somewhat misleadingly, be called a communitarianframework, have primarily to do with the community’sidea of its well-being and flourishing. The highest valuethat education within such a framework was expectedto promote and foster was, perhaps, ‘allegiance to thecommunity’.

However, even though community continues to bea powerful presence in our own times, and despiteproliferation of deliberately constructed communities,the world has for a long time been moving away froma community-centric view of human existence in twowidely divergent directions: the direction of the individualand the direction of the universal or the global. Thewell-being of the individual is seen to be more importantthan the well-being of the community. This perhaps isthe genesis of the idea of human rights as of manyother central concepts of the modern world.

Humanity is sometimes conceived as the‘community’ of all individual human beings. But this isa serious misconstrual of the idea of a community.Our attachment to the notion of community isprofound and persistent. In equating humanity to acommunity, we not only give expression to thisattachment but also invest it with a meaning it does nothave.

Given the radical change of perspective that hastaken place, education must now be seen as fosteringvalues which constitute the well-being of the individualon the one hand and the well-being of humanity onthe other.

But the difficulty here, of course, is to be clearabout the notion of the individual independent of thecomplex matrix of relationships in which an individualis inevitably located? And what is this all-inclusivehumanity, as distinct from this or that specific varietyof humanity?

The lack of clarity about the idea of an individualand humanity as such is bound to create difficulties forus in thinking about the aims of education in our times.Thus, for instance, we have to find a way out of aseeming contradiction such as: We must encouragechildren to cultivate the ‘scientific temper’ (that is, thetendency to follow their reason beyond the dictates ofculture, tradition, and community) and also teach themthe unassailable values of humanity. Also, we must finda stable room for the nation between the individualand the humanity.

3. AIMS OF EDUCATION

There are, however, issues relating to education aboutwhich we have a fairly clear idea and about which thereought to be general agreement to a large extent. It wouldbe helpful to seek an answer to the question ‘what oughtto be the aims of education?’ by way of our

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engagement with these issues:(i) School education is a deliberate and more-or-

less external intervention in the life of a child.Although much learning and teaching takesplace at home, in the neighbourhoodcommunity, and in actual living communitiesin rural and tribal India, the school introducesthe child to an environment of teaching andlearning that, quite by design, marks itself offfrom the rest of the child’s environment.Tagore’s experience of his first day at schoolis repeated with greater or less intensity in mostchildren’s first encounter with school: “…allof a sudden I found my world vanishing fromaround me, giving place to wooden benchesand straight walls staring at me with the blankstare of the blind.”* While the school mustperhaps have boundaries of its own—as thelife of the school cannot just be merged withthe life of the community around it—theseboundaries must not become barriers. Theymust, on the other hand, facilitate the creationof vital links between children’s experiences athome and in the community and what theschool offers them.

(ii) Self-knowledge is diametrically opposed toself-ignorance and self-deception. To bedeceived by others is bad but to be deceivedby oneself is even worse. However,unfortunately, we deceive ourselves much ofthe time. The big fat ego, which most of ushave, can remain fat only on a daily diet ofself-deception. Self-knowledge can beachieved only through the knowledge of theother, and one cannot know the other without

being just to the other. Education must be acontinuous process of self-discovery, oflearning the truth about oneself. This is a lifelong process; but the school, through insightfulteaching and learning situations of variouskinds, can bring home to the child the greatimportance of this process.

(iii) There is need to convince the child or theadolescent of the superiority of a life ofvirtues to a life of vice and wickedness. Theonly way to do this is to effectivelydemonstrate that genuine human happiness canspring only from a life lived in accordance withvirtues. But, how is this to be done? How isone to counter the opposite belief that it isnot the virtues but power and wealth that areconstitutive of true happiness? In a worldwhere the latter belief is pre-dominant, it maybe impossible to teach the value of virtues toour children. We need, therefore, to create thepossibility of profound questioning of oursocial structure, and show in various ways thedeep connection between human discontentand a life devoid of virtues.

In this connection, and in the light of somuch of breast-beating about the need of‘value education’, the following points needto be made about a virtuous or moral life:First, a virtuous man is not simply one whohappens to possess the virtues, say, courage,intelligence, temperance, and so on. In isolation,virtues may not have anything to do withmoral life at all. Thus, e.g., courage by itselfcan be put to incredibly evil use; think of thecourage of Nathuram Godse. The same thing

* Tagore, Rabindranath 1996. My School. In Sisir Kumar Das (Ed.) English Writings of Tagore, vol. II. Sahitya Akademi.

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can be said of intelligence. As to temperance,if it is not tempered with the vital unity of amoral life, it is in perpetual danger ofdegenerating into soulless, ritualistic discipliningof oneself.What is it that breathes morality into the virtues?It is—we must have the courage toacknowledge—truth and love, or, in terms ofour own powerful tradition of moral thought,ahimsa. Truth means freedom from self-deception;here it is never enough to speak the truthoccasionally. As Wittgenstein puts it, “The truthcan be spoken by someone who is already athome in it; not by someone who still lives infalsehood and reaches out from falsehoodtowards truth on just one occasion.”* Courage,temperance, intelligence, and so on cannotcome together in the vital unity of a virtuouslife unless they are profoundly mediated bythe love of truth. And the love of truth—when we are talking of a moral life—canflourish only in the supreme and active presenceof ahimsa.

Secondly, in the context of a moral life,the means and the end must form a continuumsuch that, as it were, the means and the endmake a wholesome unity. The distinctionbetween the means and the end in this context,if there is one at all, is not the same as thedistinction where the means is merelyinstrumental in producing the end, e.g., playingfootball as a means of keeping physically fit.Morality is not external to a virtuous life in theway football is external to physical fitness. (Theposition taken here is distinct from the

utilitarian position epitomized in the dictum‘honesty is the best policy’.) In the moral sphere,the process is integral to the product and theproduct is inalienable from the process. Here,there can be no such thing as finding the mostefficient means of achieving a predeterminedgoal (as in, say, matters of management), forthe means in the pursuit of a moral end is notreplaceable.

An important corollary of this is that ifvalue education must be a part of the educationsystem, values or virtues must be integral tothe whole process of education. Valueeducation cannot be imparted as a separatebit of education; the whole of education hasto be value education. Here, we need powerfulreminders, in a variety of ways, of theGandhian ideas of ahimsa, peace, andharmony.

(iv) Cultural diversity is one of our greatest gifts.To respect and do justice to others is also torespect and do justice to their respectivecultures or communities. We, therefore, needto radically change the centre versus peripheryperspective on intercultural relationships in ourcountry. Cultures on the so-called peripherymust receive as much attention as cultures inthe centre. As for education, its implication isthat ways of life other than one’s own mustbe imaginatively and effectively presented asdeserving of as much respect as one’s own.

(v) Individual differences are as important ascultural differences. Individual childrenfrequently have capacities and skills which donot find adequate recognition in the school

* Wittgenstein, Ludwig 1973. Culture and Value. Blackwell.

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environment. Development and flourishing ofthese skills and capacities would not onlyenhance the individual’s life but also enrich thelife of the community. Education musttherefore promote and nourish as wide arange of capacities and skills in our children aspossible. The gamut of such skills include theperforming arts (music, dance, drama, , andso on), painting and crafts, and literary abilities(weaving stories, wielding language to portraydifferent aspects of life, a flair for metaphoricaland poetic expression, etc.). Also, skills asdiverse as some children’s special capacity tobond with nature—with trees, birds, andanimals— need to be nurtured.

(vi) Knowledge is not a unitary concept. There aredifferent kinds of knowledge as well asdifferent ways of knowing. The idea thatobjectivity, which is a necessary constituent ofknowledge, can be achieved only if knowledgeis free from emotions (care, concern, and love)must be abandoned. One implication of thisfor education is that literary and artistic creativityis as much part man’s epistemic enterprise asis seeking knowledge through laboratoryexperiments or deductive reasoning. Theformer frequently enables us to see the truthin a way that the paradigmatic scientific questcannot.

(vii) Education must be seen as a liberating process;otherwise, all that has been said so far will berendered pointless. The process of educationmust therefore free itself from the shacklesof all kinds of exploitation and injustice (e.g.,poverty, gender discrimination, caste andcommunal bias), which prevent our childrenfrom being part of the process.

(viii)It is very important that school teaching andlearning takes place in an environment that isaesthetically pleasing. It is also essential thatchildren take an active part in creating such anenvironment for themselves.

(ix) It ought to be possible for every child to beproud of his or her nation. But, one can beproud of something only if it is an achievementof one’s own or if one is very intimatelyconnected with those whose achievement it is.We can be proud of our own achievements,or the achievements of our children or friends.If we feel an intimacy with God or nature,we can be proud of even the skies and thewhole universe. It is therefore very importantthat education fosters within the child anintimacy with people who are directlyconnected with achievements which are partof our national heritage. It is of course equallyimportant to see that children’s pride in theirown nation does not negate their pride in thegreat achievements of humanity as a whole.

4. SOME IMPLICATIONS FOR PEDAGOGY AND

EVALUATION

It may be useful to consider some of the implicationsof what has been said so far for pedagogy andevaluation. The strangeness of the school environmentcan be mitigated by imaginatively linking the experienceof school with the child’s experience outside it in thecommunity. While school might have many new andexciting experiences for the child, it must not appear asrejecting or even ignoring the child’s experience in thecommunity. Pedagogy will gain by incorporatingchildren’s experience of what the Greeks used to calloikos, and likewise it can teach them fresh ways ofexperiencing the world outside the school. For

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example, if a child has grown up in intimate contactwith the nature around him, as most children in tribalcommunities do, school can enrich and enhance thisintimacy by sharpening the child’s awareness of his ownnatural environment—something that sadly does nothappen in most of our schools. The role of the teacherhere is absolutely crucial. One is reminded of thenineteen-year-old teacher who came to help Tagorewith the teaching in his school:

With him boys never felt that they were confined inthe limit of a teaching class; they seemed to have theiraccess to everywhere. They would go with him to theforest when in the spring the sal trees were in fullblossom and he would recite to them his favouritepoems, frenzied with excitement… He never had thefeeling of distrust for the boys’ capacity ofunderstanding…He knew that it was not at allnecessary for the boys to understand literally andaccurately, but that their minds should be roused, andin this he was always successful. He was not like otherteachers, a mere vehicle of textbooks. He made histeaching personal, he himself was the source of it, andtherefore it was made of life stuff, easily assimilableby the living human nature.*

Pedagogy must draw upon resources of creativityand exploration, such as literature in its various formsand history in its uncovering modes, e.g., unmaskingthe mind of the colonizer as well as that of the colonized.It is important to establish connections betweenapparently discrete events and things, between thingsand events close to one and those distant in time andspace—connections which can bring sudden light tothe workings of the child’s own mind.

If the whole of education is, in a sense, moral

education, and if means and ends in moral matters areorganically or internally connected, then the teacher,who is the primary vehicle of education, must be seensubstantially as an embodiment of virtues in his role asa teacher.

Teaching should be in the conversational moderather than in the mode of authoritarian monologue.It is in the conversational mode that the child is likelyto grow in self-confidence and self-awareness and willmore easily establish connections between the teachingsand his own experience. Similarly, while learningdiscipline is an important part of education, externallyimposed discipline should merge into the orderlinessthat children perceive as an essential part of theirwell-being. Enforced accountability should alsotherefore gradually give way to a sense of responsibility,which means that there should be more emphasis onself-assessment and shared accountability.

Intelligence is diverse, and pedagogy and evaluationshould aim at making it possible for this diversity tobloom. Excellence in diverse areas should be recognizedand rewarded. And it is children’s responsiveness to whatis taught rather than just their capacity to retain it thatshould be the focus of evaluation. Such responsivenessincludes their ability to connect their learning to variousother experiences in their life, their capacity to framequestions about the content of their learning in novelways, and, particularly, their capacity to see deviations intheir ‘lessons’ from the idea of the right and the goodthat the school might be trying to inculcate in them.

* Tagore, Rabindranath 1996. My School. In Sisir Kumar Das (Ed.) English Writings of Tagore, vol. II. Sahitya Akademi.

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ANNEXURE: LANGUAGE, TRADITION AND

RATIONALITY

We begin to learn as a part of growing up in ourfamilies. While learning to speak in our native tongue,we learn many things. We are inducted into the moralorder/perspective of our family and communitythrough language. We learn to name, identify, classify,evaluate, and define our experiences in our daily life.While growing up in our respective communities, weinherit concepts that consolidate our sense ofself-identity. It is not necessary that we agree with allsuch views and perceptions, yet in some way we remaintied too them, e.g., it is possible to speak of originalityor innovation only within the context of a practice andits traditions. Our practice of speaking a languagebecomes intelligible with the help of cognitive andevaluative notions such as ‘grasping the meaning’, ‘seeingthe point’, ‘understanding’, ‘recognizing as correct’,‘recognizing the mistake’, ‘responding appropriately’,etc.

In learning to speak a language, we develop, whatMeinong called, knowledge-feelings and value-feelings.Knowledge-feelings refer to cognitive attitudes as theseare expressed in judgment of knowledge andconviction, and value-feelings are expressed throughvaluing oneself and valuing other persons and things.In learning a language, we learn to think and recognizethe significance of communicating our thoughts toothers. In our interactions with others, we experienceand become aware of patterns and structures ofhierarchy, power and authority, subordination andoppression. We also learn to cope with these structuresby finding ways to survive either by escaping them,accepting them, or confronting and resisting them. Theeasy way is not to resist or challenge but to accept

them. However, this acceptance becomes possible onlyby discouraging independent thinking.

The systematic structuring or ordering of our beliefsconstitutes a theory, and a practice is developed throughthe consistency of our efforts. Practical knowledgeserves as the bedrock of all knowledge. All theoreticalknowledge is an articulation of what we have learntthrough participation in the practices of ourcommunities. In different communities, the practicesand traditions vary widely.

The term ‘tradition’ may be interpreted in manyways. In its barest sense, it means that which is handeddown or transmitted from generation to generation ina community because it consists of devices andprinciples that have helped the community to makesense of its experiences and activities. Perhaps, it wasfor this reason that Wittgenstein had rightly remarked,‘Tradition is not…. A thread he (man) can pick upwhen he feels like it any more than a man can choosehis own ancestors.’*

Education, as a planned endeavour, at a personallevel on a small scale or institutional level on a largescale, aims at making children capable of becomingactive, responsible, productive, and caring membersof society. They are made familiar with the variouspractices of the community by imparting the relevantof skills and ideas. . Ideally, education is supposed toencourage the students to analyse and evaluate theirexperiences, to doubt, to question, to investigate—inother words, to be inquisitive and to thinkindependently.

As we grow, we face new and unfamiliarexperiences which question our old ways of thinkingas these experiences are either inconsistent with or at aconsiderable variance from what we had gradually learnt

* Wittgenstein, Ludwig 1973. Culture and Value. Blackwell. p. 76.

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to take for granted. Such experiences are critical andchallenging as they involve or require formulation ofnew concepts, revision of preconceived notions, andnew ways of looking at and dealing with the world.It is this unique human ability that is called rationality,which is manifested in human behaviour in a wide varietyof ways.

Our attempts to make sense of our experiences,to comprehend the world that we live in, require thatwe recognize patterns, structures, and order in theworld. Without such recognition, we would not beable to make any judgments, we would not be in a

position to be certain about anything. This quest forcertainty, taken to its extreme, may become a demandfor a monistic and absolute criterion by which it wouldbe possible to draw sharp lines between the rationaland the irrational, knowledge and a lack of it. Inbecoming captives of such a restricting vision, weforget that there are numerous ways in which we learntto know and to reason about the world. This forgettingleads us to reduce rationality to mere formulas ofdeductive reasoning, placing greater value on theoryover practice, natural sciences over art, and informationover knowledge.