The social mould of Education
There are other definitions that give a social orientation to the concept of
education, according to some thinkers education is a means to achieve larger
societal goals as it is a sub-system of the macro-societal system, hence the
education of an individual should emphasize his/her orientation to achieve the
social goals.
Kautilya: “Education means training for the country and love for the nation”.
John Dewey: “All education proceeds by the participation of the individual in
the social consciousness of the race”.
The university education commission (1948-49) – “Education should aim the
preservation and enrichment of the democratic values of life such as justice,
liberty, equality, and fraternity”.
The Kothari commission (1964-66) – “The progress of modernization will be
directly related to the pace of educational advancement. And the one sure way
to modernize is to spread education to produce educated and skilled citizens
and to train an adequate and competent intelligentsia from all strata of
society”.
“Challenge of Education: A policy perspective”- “Education as a unique
investment in the present and in future”.
International Commission on Education for the Twenty-first Century, 1996 –
‘The report states that “formal education must therefore provide enough time
and opportunity in its programs to introduce the young, from childhood to
cooperative undertakings through participation in social activities such as
neighborhood renovation, helping the unprivileged, humanitarian work,
inter-generational assistance, etc”.
Indira Gandhi’s “Education is a liberating force, and in our age it is also a
democratization force, cutting across the barriers of caste and class,
smoothing out inequalities imposed by birth and other circumstances”.
A. P. J. Abdul Kalam: “Education is one that fosters capacities such as the
spirit of inquiry, creativity, entrepreneurial and moral leadership which are
central to nation-building in a democracy’’. There are many other definitions
that have been proposed for education. Various forms of classification are
based on criteria that emerge from these definitions, but none of them come to
be a final kind of classification.
However, Redden has tried to find education by putting all views together as,
“Education is the deliberate and systematic influence, exerted by the matured
person upon the immature through instruction, discipline and harmonious
development of physical, intellectual, aesthetic, social and spiritual powers
of the human being, according to individual and social needs and directed
towards the union of the educand with his/her creator as the final end”.
