- M. K. Kaw
Background
India has a long history of innovating and including elements of moral and ethical education in our education systems. This element constituted a prime ingredient in the Gurukul system, which had ruled the roost until the advent of the British. Macaulay dealt a death blow to this system with his infamous note on education. As a result, the country was deprived of about one lakh Gurukuls and the educational system lost its linkage with the entire philosophical tradition of the ancient Indian scriptures.
After independence, there have been several attempts at inculcating elements of value education in the new Educational Policies that were enunciated from time to time but with little impact. The idea itself was scotched time and again with vague references to the ideals of secularism and so-called modernity.
A valiant attempt was made in 1998 when a Joint Parliamentary Committee on this subject was constituted by Parliament. This committee recommended the initiation of a full-blown Education in Human Values Programme, based on the five fundamental human values of Truth, Non-Violence, Love, Peace and Righteous Conduct. When this was challenged in the Supreme Court of India, the Apex Court held that the teaching of human values did not constitute a violation of the principle of secularism as enshrined in the Constitution. The court in fact advocated the inclusion of all the high moral values as enunciated by different religions. As a result of this historic judgment, several elements of moral and ethical values got included in the official curriculum of Teacher’s Training.
As a corollary to this basic enunciation of human values, the most important impact was felt in the curricula taught by educational institutions run by religious denominations and sects. Thus all the important moral and spiritual teachings got included in their curricula. In 2011 the Constitution of India was amended so as to define the concept of secularism in a broader sense.
An important step was the setting up of a comprehensive strategy for the teaching of human values by the acceptance of human values as an essential and critical element of the education process. This was achieved by the deployment of teachers trained in human values and letting them loose. A significant example of this kind of training was the training program run by the Satya Sai International Centre in Delhi.
Principals and Headmasters of targeted schools were brought to suitable locations and imparted multi-dimensional training in the concepts and application of the five fundamental values. Over eight years more than 1100 teachers were thus trained in five-day programs. An online program on EHV is available on the website of the centre. Several thousand students are registered under this program.
An assessment of the present situation
The EHV program has been moving in a desultory manner depending on the interest taken by the head of the Ministry, HRD. The current situation can be summed up as under:
Organization
In 1997 a detailed organizational setup was put in place. It was masterminded by a national organization committee headed by Secretary HRD himself. The Group contained representatives of various bodies like NCERT, NIOS, KVS, NVS, National Institute for the training of educational administrators and the representatives drawn from various religious, cultural and social organizations like the Ramakrishna Mission, Aurobindo Ashram, Maulana Wahidudin Khan etc. The idea was to understand the strategy adopted by various socio-religious groups in the field of EHV. The meetings of the organization committee led to the creation of coordination centres in each of the apex bodies, collection, and analysis of data relating to activities of the field units, holding of national/international seminars to forge a common strategy for all the field organizations etc.
The NCERT brought out a National Journal on the EHV which acted as a mouthpiece for various groups involved in the EHV program. This continued for about a decade.
The work relating to EHV was entrusted as a whole time activity to a Deputy Secretary in MHRD and a division was entrusted to him to deal with EHV issues. However as the Ministry was divided into two soon after this, it was not clear as to who was really in charge of the subject. It often appeared that the department of Higher Education disclaimed responsibility while the Department of Schooling and Literacy did the same. As such papers flitted between the two Ministries with no one taking the responsibility.
Some bright spots
In this dismal picture of inaction and apathy, there were some bright spots. For e.g. Prof
RR Gaur & Prof P.L Dhar, 2 professors of IIT Delhi owned the program and held several training programs for engineers passing out from different IITs.
The Current Proposal
It is proposed to revive the EHV program through the IC Centre of Governance by running training programs for heads of educational institutions. An attempt will be made to persuade the central ministries dealing with human resource development to fund the program and review the content on an annual basis.
It is learned that the Department of Personnel, Ministry of Home Affairs has also evinced interest in the running of such programs so long as there is no interfaith conflict. The Centre for Governance is drawing funds for running training courses for critical categories of manpower in departments of the Central Govt as well as CPSUs. A similar initiative will be undertaken for the Education in Human Values program.
The overall coordinative apparatus will be launched from the Centre for Governance. It will be jointly directed by the Centre, the Ministry of Human Resource Development, the NCERT, the ICPR, the KVS, the NVS, and other cognate organizations.
Need for a common school system
One of the main points of criticism of the present school system in India is the fact that there is a private sector run by business houses which are trying to mint money by running schools as profit-making enterprises. On the other hand, many of the Government schools waste the funds provided to them by the Govt and bring the entire system into disrepute.
This problem has been sorted out in many countries by the evolution of a common school system. Several discussions in the Centre for Governance have led us to the conclusion that the simplest, quickest and most effective method of evolving a common school system in India would be to extend the coverage of the Navodaya Vidyalaya system to all the blocks of the country.
While implementing this proposal, other cognate steps would also need to be taken as under:
- The 2 Ministries dealing with education to be joined together to form a single undivided whole
- Even if the 2 ministries are kept separate it should be made amply clear that all matters relating to the school system in the operation of the common school system shall be the sole undivided responsibility of the Ministry dealing with the schools
EHV and recruitment to the Civil Services
An offshoot of the EHV program is the inclusion of a special paper in the prelims of the Civil Services exam. This paper examines the values and attitudes of the candidates. While this must have had some impact on the kind of persons who seek to join the Civil services, there is no systematic follow-up of the impact down the line.
Education and Philosophy
The exercise of amending the National curricular framework is supposed to provide a much-needed change in the philosophy of education. We have also an ad-hoc decision that yoga should be part of the curriculum. An interesting point which came to light in a recent study of the ICPR was that Napoleon Bonaparte had made philosophy a compulsory discipline right from the primary stage.
The ICPR report has recommended that the French example should be emulated in our system by making Indian philosophy and yoga as integral components of the school curriculum right from the primary stage. Acceptance of this would also be in consonance with the UNESCO’s charter on the Treasure within (1999) which recommends that children should not only learn but also learn how they learn. It would further make yoga an integral part of the study of philosophy.
Conclusion
To conclude we suggest that there should be a national coordinative forum for EHV in the Centre for Governance of the ICCfG. The proposal maybe discussed first at the official level and then the consolidated proposal placed for approval before the Union Education minister as part of the New Education policy now under preparation.