Sunday, July 21, 2002		Books

Speaking of education
S. P. Dhawan

Higher Education and Development
by G. S. Yonzone. Himalaya Publishing House, Mumbai. Pages 122. Rs 275.

THE importance and relevance of education to development in a developing country like India is often ignored. The relation between development and education was not clearly discernible or vividly demonstrated in the past decades since higher education was accessible only to the elite. The Education Commission has rightly observed that "in a world based on science and technology, it is education that determines the level of prosperity, welfare and security of the people."

Adjudged both by its title and author's claim, the book under review seeks to stress the need for realising the same objective of utilising higher education for the progress and development of the country. However, some of the chapters concentrating on the problems of hilly areas deviate the work from its stated purpose of discussing development in a manner applicable to the entire country. The book, being actually a compilation of 15 articles presented as papers during a seminar, lacks both coherence and consistency. The editor is Dr G. S. Yonzone, Principal of Kalimpong College. If he is to be believed above 80 per cent of the total population of India comprises farmers and from this assumption he concludes that "our higher education system should be especially geared to solving the needs and problems of farming community." This is too sweeping and lopsided as it ignores the need for progress on other fronts such as electronics, computers, space, telecommunication systems, etc., which we can ignore only at the risk of remaining mired in backwardness.

Differing with the editor, Brigadier N .K. Gurung opines that our students should be given realistic feels for the science-based rapidly changing society of tomorrow. Jaya Indiresan argues that the much-talked-about empowerment of women can be achieved only by their enrollment in institutions of higher learning and at the same time by giving them leadership training so as to make them self-reliant and progressive. S. K. Kulshreshtha, a teacher of zoology, expects education policy planners to give due consideration to the kinds of diversity-morphological, ecological, political, economical, linguistic, gender-specific, etc., so that it may lead to harmonious and cordial coexistence of different social formations.

UGC Chairman Hari Gautam and A.S. Desai, a former chairperson of the UGC, stress the need for making education a means for achieving individual motivation, ethical uplift, moral sublimity, personal integrity and integrated development of personality through a synthesis of the studies of the science and liberal arts.

Though these papers invariably remind us that most of these ideas have been repeatedly put forth by a large number of commissions and committees formed from time to time, it is a harsh reality that recommendations of such bodies are almost invariably placed on the dusty shelves and then forgotten. It is hoped that some of the remedies suggested in these articles e.g. abolition of multiple entrance test, mushroom growth of institutions of higher learning without proper infrastructure and inculcation of ethical and moral values among students will not suffer from similar neglect.