Institutional
Planning -Why and How
J.P. Naik
Educational planning implies
the taking of decisions for future action with a view to achieving
pre-determined objectives through the optimum use of scarce resources. There
are three main elements in this definition: (1) Pre-determined objectives; (2)
Use of scarce resources; and (3) Taking decisions.
(1)
Pre-determined Objectives : These will include such problems as (i) relating
education to national development, (ii) content of education, (iii) educational
standards, (iv) technology of education and (v) expansion of facilities.
(2)
Use of Scarce Resources : There are three scarce resources in education:
(a) Time—The explosion of knowledge has made
it necessary to learn a great deal in a short time. Moreover, India has to
catch up quickly with the industrially advanced countries. From this point of
view, the significance of effecting economy in teaching and learning and
telescoping educational development cannot be overstressed.
(b) Talent —Intensive efforts have to be made to discover and
develop talent among students especially at the secondary and university
stages; and programmes have to be prepared to attract and retain an adequate
share of the best talent available to the teaching profession.
(c) Material resources including money —Money
is the third scarce resource in all situations and this is specially so in the
developing countries like India. It must, however, be remembered that, in
developing economies, other materials are also scarce (e. g., cement and
steel or paper for books and printing capacity) and realistic educational
planning should take these scarcities also into account.
(3)
Taking Decisions : Educational Plans will have to bs prepared for each level at which a
decision is taken, namely, institution, chief administrative unit for a group
of institutions (a district for schools, a university for higher education
etc.), state and nation. The object of this paper is 10 discuss the
problem of institutional planning in some of its major aspects.
II
WHY DO WE NEED INSTITUTIONAL
PLANS?
A major weakness of our
planning system is top-heaviness. Our planning process resembles an inverted
pyramid because so much of it is being done at the top and so little at the
bottom. As is well-known, educational planning is mostly done at present at the
Centre —in the Planning Commission and in the Ministry of Education and Youth
Services. It is also done, to some extent, in the Stale Education Departments
and there is a small cell in each Directorate to look after the preparation and
implementation of educational plans. Because of the developmental grants given
by the University Grants Commission, there is some attempt at planning—although
often ad hoc and perfunctory—in the universities also. But there is hardly
any planning at any other level. There are no district plans and, what is
worse, no plans for individual educational institutions. In other words, our
planning started at the top—in Delhi—and started to descend downwards at so
slow a pace that in the last eighteen years, it has come down to one more level
only and has reached the state capitals or university headquarters. It has
still a long way to go to reach the district level and even longer to reach
individual institutions.
This
top-based approach to educational planning has three main disadvantages. The
first is that it is peripheral and does not involve the crucial areas in
educational development. The educational
process takes place in the classroom and hence the core of any
educational plan should be the plans prepared by each educational institution.
It is only these plans that can adequately deal with such basic educational
issues as individual attention to students, improvement of curricula, adoption
of modern methods of teaching and evaluation, intensive utilization of
available facilities, or establishing close contacts with the local community
through programmes of mutual service and support. These tend to be neglected in
state and national level plans.
The second disadvantage of planning from the top is
that it tends to be expenditure-oriented, i.e., it begins to over-emphasise
investment in monetary terms on the native belief 'that there is no defect in
education that more money cannot set right'. It is true that all educational
plans will have financial implications and will need some investment of money
for their implementation. But there is a world of difference between an
educational plan which has financial implications and a basically financial
plan which proposes to incur a given expenditure of money on certain
educational programmes. In fact, this difference is as wide and as fundamental
as that between 'eating to live' and 'living to eat'. We have not realised this
basic difference and have given an unusual expenditure-orientation to all our
plans. The cost of the plan, rather than its content, has become more important
to us and a more integral part in our thinking on the subject.
The third disadvantage in this process of planning
from above is that it does not involve the willing and enthusiastic
participation of important groups—inspecting officers, teachers, parents and
students. My criteria of a good educational plan is that it must be known to
all inspecting officers and teachers (and wherever necessary, to parents and
students also), that it must be able to secure their full co-operation and that
it must assign specific responsibilities and duties to each teacher and
inspecting officer. This does not happen at present. I have, for instance,
tried to find out how many teachers and inspecting officers know about the
educational plans. These are of course known to the Planning Commission, the
Ministry of Education and Youth Services, and the Directorate of Education in
the States. I have found that the District Officers generally know little about
them and the subordinate inspecting officers as well as secondary and primary
teachers hardly know anything. How can a plan which so few know about and in
which the average teacher and inspecting officer has so little to do can ever
be implemented.
If these difficulties are to
be removed, the major reform needed in our system of educational planning is to
broad-base and decentralise it through the preparation of plans at the
institutional and district levels, to supplement the plans at the state and
national levels. The programme of district plans has been dealt with in a
separate paper, and 1 shall, therefore, in this document, deal with the
programme of institutional planning only.
Speaking on the positive
aspect of the problem, I might point out that the system of institutional
planning will have several advantages; in particular, it will help us to solve
four urgent problems in education:-
(a)
The first of these problems is to encourage initiative, freedom and creativity
of the individual teacher. This is a very important problem because we must
have rebels in education to rebuild it. If we analyse our educational system we
find that, like our social organisation, it is too authoritarian in character.
Every one of us is a little dictator or a despot; and in the broad functioning
of our Education Departments, we find that very little freedom is allowed to
the classroom teacher or to the individual institution. This has gone so deep
in our blood that we never even realise it. I was holding a Seminar of
Inspecting Officers in Delhi. It was on "Creativity in Education". As
it was a mixed audience of men and women, I tried to pull their legs and asked
"Who is more creative—men or women teachers ?" Somebody said
"women teachers". "Very good", I said, "Why?" And
one man said: "Sir, they are so much more obedient". This emphasis on
obedience and conformity is so ingrained in our blood that I will not be
surprised if a Director of Education were to issue a Circular, with reference
to the recommendation of the Education Commission that teachers should be given
initiative and freedom to experiment, and say: "Government has been
pleased to accept the recommendation of the Education Commission that teachers
should have freedom to be creative. You are, therefore, directed hereby that,
from such and such a date, you shall be creative in all your work. Failure to
do so shall be taken serious note of". I do not quite rule out a circular
of this type. I wish there were more experimentation in education than there is
at present; and a major practical problem we have to tackle is to discover ways
and means to give this freedom, this opportunity to experiment, to the individual
teacher in the classroom.
(b)
The second problem refers to the means needed to make good teachers effective.
In India, we now have a very queer dilemma or problematic situation. On one
hand, we have programmes for which we do not get good personnel to implement;
and this becomes the main reason of the failure to implement them. On the other
hand, we find that, even today, there are thousands of good teachers, young,
enthusiastic, wanting to do something, and each one of them feels frustrated
because he does not get an adequate opportunity and support to express himself.
The question, therefore, that worries me is this: how can we give freedom and
support to these teachers who are wanting to do something ? I am not so much
worried about getting people to implement the programmes we have in view. I
think that, even if we can create a situation where a teacher wanting to do
something new finds an adequate opportunity to express himself, we would have
achieved a great deal. Putting it biologically, I might say, that we want to
create a few living cells of education where some creative thinking can be
generated. It does not matter how few these cells are or how widely scattered
they are. If we can somehow create an environment suitable for the coming into
existence of these living cells, we would have taken the first great step; and
in course of time, the infection will spread. There will be more cells of this
type and the whole system will begin to grow.
I have a thesis about the manner in which a
revolution in Indian education can come about. I have no hope of carrying a
revolution from Delhi to the thousands of schools. That is impossible, partly
because no revolution can be born in Delhi and partly because, even if such a
revolution is born there, it will die by the time it reaches the remotest
village. But there is every possibility of carrying a revolution from the
village school to Delhi. In other words, if we get some creative thought at the
Centre, the chances of this creative thought reaching the remote school and
doing something useful there are rare. But if teachers are trying to face their
problems creatively and originally, some new ideas might be born which might
travel up to Delhi and fertilise the whole field of education. If this faith
has some justification, I believe it has, we have to find a method wherein
freedom can be given to teachers who want to do something so that they can
become effective.
(c)
The third problem relates to the involvement of teachers in educational
planning. I do not think that in the last three plans, the teachers were
concerned either with the formulation of the plans or with their
implementation. They were unconcerned to such an extent that I wonder whether
they even knew what the plans were. When 1 go out on tour, 1 meet educational
officers and teachers and ask them some questions to find out if they know the
educational plan of their State. 1 find that the Directorates and the
Secretariats know the plans. At the district level, some officers know and some
do not, but the vast majority only have vague ideas. The average secondary
school headmaster or teacher does not know what the plan is because he is riot
concerned. The primary schools have never seen the plan. This is so because the
plan is merely a statement showing the allocation of funds with which only the
finance and Secretariat people are concerned. You will all agree that it is the
teachers who have to implement the plan, and that no one else can implement it.
But if the teachers themselves do not know what the plan is, how can they
implement it ? Here is perhaps one explanation as to why the plan shave not
been implemented satisfactorily. If we want better results in future, it is
obvious that We must involve everyone of them, in the formulation of the plan
and in its implementation.
(d)
The fourth problem, and this is an important problem, is that whereas, on one
hand, there are so many things to be done for which we do not have resources,
there are, on the other hand, vast existing resources and facilities which are
not adequately utilized. There are thousands of things in education which have
to be done, buildings have to be built; new classes have to be opened; new
institutions have to be started; equipment has to be purchased; and so on. You
can cite a hundred things which need to be done and which will need crores of
rupees which we do not have. This is one side of the problem. But the other
side also is equally important. There are thousands of things which can be
done, even in the existing situation, and nobody seems to do them. There is a
big range of 'shoulds', for which we have no resources and side by side, there
is an equally big range of 'coulds' for which we have no workers. What we do at
present is to point out one or two things that should be done; and when we find
that this cannot be done, we suddenly jump to the conclusion that nothing need
be done at all. So long as we can find out some excuse or justification for not
doing a thing which should be done, we conclude that nothing need be done and
thus find a philosophical justification for our lack of enterprise and courage,
This is a psychologically convenient situation. But there can be no progress on
this basis. The question we should
raise is this: what is the maximum 1 can do in the existing situation and with
the existing resources? Having found this out, we should go about it in a
spirit of dedication. In other words, we have to motivate people to recognise
the 'coulds' and to attempt them rather than to concentrate on the 'shoulds'
which are not practicable.
My claim is that the
institutional plan is the unique answer to all these four problems, namely (1)
giving freedom to the teacher, (2) making the good teacher effective, (3)
involving every teacher in the formulation and implementation of plans, (4)
emphasizing what can be done here and now by mobilising our existing resources
rather than wait for the impossible to happen. If all these four problems have
to be solved, we must develop the concept of institutional planning and tell
each institution to prepare and implement its plans.
This idea that educational
planning can only be effective if it is practised, not only at the national and
state levels but also at the district and institutional levels can be explained
on yet another basis which education shares with life itself. Life, for
instance, is becoming bigger and vaster; and simultaneously, it is also taking
greater and greater care of the smaller and the smaller. Man has already landed
on the moon, and thus the whole cosmos has come within his purview. At the same
time, he is also working on the electron. It is in this simultaneous working
from the biggest to the smallest that the progress of civilization lies. This
is really an approach to God whom the Upmshads describe as 'smaller than the
smallest and greater than the greatest'. This realisation of God comes to
us when, on one side, we stretch ourselves to the infinite and on the other,
identify ourselves with the smallest and the humblest.
Education also has to play a similar role. On one
side, our concept of education must become large enough to embrace the entire
universe and re-teaching of the man to peaceful co-existence in one world. On
the other, it will also have to be humble enough to pay adequate attention to
the needs of each individual. These two approaches are not contradictory as is
sometimes feared. But unfortunately, man sometimes forgets small things in
giving attention to the big things; and it is here that the danger lies.
In keeping with this broad philosophy, I would say
that the process of educational planning can be summed up just in one sentence.
At one end, educational planning should embrace the whole country and even the
whole world; at the other it should treat each institution as an individual
entity which, in its turn, should be able to regard every child as an individual
with his own needs and aspirations. We would have achieved our goal if we had
developed both these programmes together.
In the process of magnifying the scope of
educational planning, however, we have unfortunately lost sight of the
individual institution and of its uniqueness, which necessitates planning at
the institutional level. It is to correct this mistake that we propose to
develop this programme of institutional planning in which we want to pay
adequate attention to the microcosm, the individual institution, without
forgetting the wider horizon, the macrocosm of state and national planning.
Ill
INSTITUTIONAL
PLANNING : SOME DO'S AND DONT'S
Assuming that institutional
planning is accepted as a programme, some important questions arise ; how do we
set about preparation of plans at the institutional level? What are the things
that we should do in this regard and what are the things which we should
carefully avoid ? What is the content and scope of educational plans? What are
the agencies which will collaborate in the preparation of institutional plans?
How do we avoid conflict, if any, between the institutional plans and the
district, state or national plans? It is necessary to answer questions of this
type very carefully if the programme is to succeed. In this context, I would
like to make a few important points.
My first point is that if
institutional plans are properly prepared, there can be no conflict between
them and the plans at the district, state or national levels. They have all to
fit into each other. The national plan, for instance, does not decide
everything. If it does so, it will again be an authoritarian plan. The national
plan, therefore, should decide upon some broad programmes of national
significance and leave a very large freedom to the states to plan in the light
of their own conditions. The state plans will go into more specific details,
within the framework of national plan. In their turn, the state plans also
should not decide everything but leave a good deal of freedom to the people at
the district level to plan for themselves. The district plans will be drawn up
within the broad framework of the state plans. But even at the district level,
we should leave a good many choices to individual institutions so that they can
plan and implement their own programmes. Even in an institutional plan, there
should be freedom to an individual teacher to plan something for Himself; and
so on. The existence of choices and planning go together. If choices do not
exist, there can be no planning. As choices exist at all the tour levels— nation,
stale, district and institution—there should be a system of integrated plans at
the national, state, district-and institutional level. But while planning at
any given level, one follows certain broad principles and leave enough freedom
and elasticity to the next level to make some chances of its own. Similarly,
the plan at each level should try to implement the plans at all the higher
levels. For instances, the institutional plan will, in some way, implement the
national plan, the state plan and even the district plan. Planning is thus a
two-way process. Ideas from the institutions and the choices they make will
rise up to the districts, then to the states and then to the national level
just as ideas from the national level will come down to the state, district or
institutional levels. This continuous process of downward and upward movement
of ideas must go on if planning is to improve in quality. There is thus no
conflict really between planning at these higher levels and at the
institutional level.
My second point is that an
institutional plan should be prepared mainly from the point of view of the best
utilisation of existing resources. Every institution needs additional resources
and if we concentrate only on the additional resources we need, the
institutional plan becomes merely a charter of demands. Funds to meet these
demands will not be available and this will land us only in frustration. We had
a good example of this in the old Fourth Plan. The University Grants Commission
decided that every university should prepare a plan for itself and requested
them to do so. Now every university thought, quite naturally, that it should
prepare as large a plan as possible and there was a competition in putting up big
plans. The total of all such plans came to about Rs. 300 crores (this was an
under-estimate and it should easily have gone up to three thousand crores),
against a sum of Rs. 58 crores that actually came to be allotted. This led to
great frustration. The Director of Education in Andhra Pradesh carried out a
simple exercise to find out the additional amount that will be required to give
an adequate building to every secondary school in the State. He found that, for
secondary school buildings alone, the cost would be Rs. 10 crores. For primary
schools, he found that a sum of Rs. 30 crorers was required for buildings
alone. This is the sort of a picture that we get on the basis of additional
funds needed. If we ask the institutions to plan, and do not tell them what or
how to plan, they will naturally put forward large demands which will add up to
fantastic totals. Then we will have to tell them that we do not have the money
and this will make them lose faith in planning itself. This is a situation we
have to guard ourselves against.
I am not saying that the
additional resources are not wanted. They are wanted and let us try our best to
provide them. But in institutional planning, let us ask this question to every
institution : "What can you do within the existing resources available (or
with a little more feasible addition to it) by better planning, and harder work
?" I do not think there is any escape either from better planning or from
hard work. Education is essentially a stretching process and the teachers and
the students have to stretch themselves to their utmost. If they refuse to
stretch themselves, education does not even begin. You may provide the best
equipment and the best buildings. But if this stretching is not there, you will
have no education. Unfortunately, this is an idea which people have not
appreciated quite well. Over large sections of the educational fields,
the students do not want to learn and the teachers do not want to teach; and in
the absence of these two basic things, we are planning buildings, methods,
materials, or improvement of salaries.
What I want to emphasize again
is that education is essentially a stretching process. It has to stretch teachers
and students to the utmost. We have to engage every student in a meaningful and
challenging task for 8 to 10 hours a day, for 7 days a week and for 52 weeks a
year. This is the challenge; and it cannot be met by external discipline. We
have to create a climate of commitment to knowledge, commitment to social
service, and commitment to hard work. I believe that the institutional plan
should be used as a tool for this purpose.
It will be worthwhile here
to give an illustration of the work done by my friend Shri Gobardhanlal Bakshi
who is the Director of Education in the Punjab. He is the first man who tried
the idea of institutional planning. In his college, he found that stagnation
was very high and that the results were only about 50 per cent. He called a
meeting of his teachers and asked them if anything could be done to improve the
results. Only one decision was taken. Since the students' parents live very
close by in the city, it was decided that, every two months, a report on the
progress of the students should be sent to the parents. "If the parents
have entrusted their children to us', said the teachers, 'we should at least
tell them, every two months, how their sons or daughters are progressing'. This
was not an easy thing to do. They found that, if the task is to be done well,
the written work of the student will have to be carefully evaluated; and since
several teachers are concerned with each student, they had to meet regularly to
discuss the progress reports. This was tried out for one year. There was no
additional expenditure, no additional staff. It was only a question of giving
proper leadership and showing the way. What was the result? The stagnation went
down and the percentage of passes increased from 50 to 85 per cent. It is now
proposed to extend the scheme throughout the Union Territory of Chandigarh. In
a plan of Rs. 145 lakhs ( 1 lakh = 100,000) for Chandigarh, this programme
costs less than 2 lakhs. There are so many programmes of this type which cost
little, cost nothing at all, except human effort and better planning. In a poor
country, and India is one, people are caught in a vicious circle. They cannot
improve education because they are poor; and they remain poor because education
is not improved. This vicious circle can be broken only in one way, namely,
through human effort. If we work hard, plan better, make the best use of resources
available, we can break this vicious circle and get out of it. If we want the
problems of education to be solved with the help of money alone, I do not
believe that problems of education can ever be solved. Do we really have an
idea of our poverty and of how little we are spending on education? The entire
educational expenditure in India is about Rs. 16 per head per year. In America,
they spend about Rs. 1200 per head per year on education today. The differences
are fantastic. An average American spends about 70 dollars a year on cigarettes
and we spend less than three dollars on education. What we spend on education
in India is a little less than what an average American spends on sleeping
pills. At such different levels of economic development and poverty, how on
earth are we to compete with other countries on the basis of money? But we can
compete on the basis of human effort, on the basis of talent, on the basis of
better planning. If we do that, we shall put the talents in our large population to an effective use
and really make an advance.
An institutional plan must
be addressed to questions like these: How do we reduce wastage? How do we
reduce stagnation? How do we make better use of existing facilities? A hundred
examples could be given of sound institutional plans. Let me just take one, the
example of a school in Bombay. As you know, there is acute congestion in the
middle class s in Bombay city; ninety per cent or more of the families in
Bombay live in single-room hutments; and a family often means parents, grand
parents, sometimes four or five brothers, sometimes an older brother who is
married, and so on. There might be two or three married couples also in that
family, and all of them have to spend their whole time in one room. This is life
in Bombay. The buildings are multi-storeyed and look very big, but the space a
family occupies is just like a pigeon-hole. In this family life, the children
have no place at at all, no place to sit, no place to study. If the family
is poor, they cannot also send their children out in the vacation. Now this
friend of mine organises every year a summer camp in his school. It is a very
simple programme. In the summer vacation, the school building is vacant and the
grounds are available. So the whole school building is turned into a dormitory.
Every student is told that he can go for food and stay and spend all his
time in the school. He thus actually lives there, be sleeps there, and
participates in the activities arranged. Some teachers are on duty and
organise personal reading, guided study, recreation. The student can quietly
spend the whole day and night in the school. I have seen these camps and
noticed how happy the children are in these camps. They would have been happier
if they would have gone to Mahabaleshwar or Matheran but that is not possible.
The cost per student does not come to more than 3 or 4 rupees per year. But in
that little cost, the students feel refreshed, their studies improve and the
existing facilities are better utilised. There is no need to give other
examples. The point I am making is that the very purpose of institutional
planning is to utilise existing resources in the most effective manner and to
overcome the shortcomings of material inputs through better planning and
greater human effort. In every situation in India, there is a lot that can be
done and there is no situation in India, however bad, where nothing can be
done. It is for us to discover the best that can be done in every situation
through better planning and greater human effort and with little or no
additional monetary inputs. This should be the basic idea of an institutional
plan. One should assume that the additional resources are limited; and within
them, strive to do a good deal.
My third point is that the
institutional plans must be democratically oriented and that they must involve
everyone concerned—headmasters, teachers, parents and students. I find that
authoritarian attitudes often continue to dominate even when we create an
institutional plan to give freedom to the teacher. In Rajasthan, I was
attending a Seminar on Institutional Planning in Kotah and a very enthusiastic
headmaster from a rural area was describing the plan he had prepared for his
school. He started by saying 'In my school', 'my plan', 'I did', etc. I was
waiting to see whether he would use the word 'we' once at least. But he did
not. He was a very dedicated teacher and had completely identified himself with
his school. But he had a blind spot on consultations. At the end, I asked him :
'Don't you think it necessary to consult your teachers in preparing this plan
?'. 'My teachers' he answered with surprise, 'they are all my students. They
all are good, and whatever I say, they accept as a matter of course'. You will
thus find that this authoritarian attitude enters even in this very attempt to
liberate teachers. What we are out for is the freedom of the individual child;
and the individual child will not get his freedom unless the individual teacher
gets his freedom. The individual teacher will not get his freedom unless the
attitude of the headmaster is changed; and the headmaster's attitude will not
be changed until the inspector or director changes. Thus it goes all the way up
to the top. This is another point we have to remember, we must involve
everyone.
My fourth point is that
institutional planning should be practical and realistic rather than Utopian or
ambitious. In other words, we must have a different motto for institutional
planning. Our usual motto is: 'not failure but low aim is crime'. This is a
good idea. But we use this idea in a wrong way. We choose a high aim and when
we fail, we justify it philosophically as inherent in the high aim itself. This
is a bad policy in all matters and especially in institutional planning. For
institutional plan, therefore, our motto should be: 'not high aim but failure
is a crime'. I do not mind how small a plan a teacher prepares. Let somebody
say, ‘I want to improve the handwriting of my children’. I will
be quite happy. What you decide to do is immaterial. But once you decide to do
something, I will not accept any excuse for a failure. This is what we have to
insist upon : doing things with dignity, with price in one-self and with
success. If we follow this up, institutional plan can be put successfully on
the ground.
IV
INSTITUTIONAL PLANNING:
MEASURES FOR INTRODUCING THE SYSTEM
What are the steps needed to
introduce a system of institutional plans in a State? The following suggestions
in this "regard is put forward for the consideration of the State
Governments.
(1)
It should be a condition of recognition and grant-in-aid that every institution
prepares a fairly long-term plan of its own development. Against the background
of this plan, it should also be required to prepare a Five-Year Plan
(coinciding with the State Five Year Plans) and an annual plan indicating the
activities proposed to be undertaken during the ensuing year.
(2)
These plans prepared by the institutions should form the basis of the
periodical inspections. The object of these inspections should be to help the
institution to prepare the best plans it could within its available resources
and to guide it for their successful implementation. If this is done the
present ad hoc character of inspection will mostly disappear.
(3)
Some broad guidelines for the preparation of such plans should be issued by the
State Education Department. These will indicate, in broad terms, the policies
of the State Government included in its own plans which will have to be
reflected suitably in the plans of the institutions. It should, however, be
clearly understood that the guidelines issued by the State Government are
recommendatory and not mandatory. It should be open to a school, for given
reasons, not to take up a programme included in the guidelines, to modify the
programmes given therein or even to take up new programmes not included in the
guidelines.
(4)
An even more important measure is to arrange suitable training in the programme
for all inspecting officers of the State and for headmasters. This should
essentially be a responsibility of the State Institute of Education.
(5)
A long-term plan will be prepared by the institution to be covered in such a
period of time which it deems convenient. The Five-Year Plans, as stated
earlier, should be made to coincide with the State's own plans. For preparing
the annual plans, it is necessary to provide some specific time in the school
year; and it is, therefore, suggested that about a week
in the beginning of each academic year and a week towards its end should be
reserved for the purpose. The following steps may be taken with advantage: —
(a)
The
school should open for teachers on the prescribed day but the students should
be required to attend a week later. In other words, in the first week of the opening
of the school, the teachers should be on duty without being required to take
classes. This period can then be conveniently devoted in continuous meetings
and discussions and for preparing a detailed annual plan of work of the school
in all its aspects; co-curricular, curricular, class plans, subject plans and
detailed plans for each programme the school proposes to undertake.
(b)
Similarly, at the end of the year there should be a week when teachers are on
duty but the students have been let off. This week should be utilised for a
careful evaluation of the implementation of the annual plans.
The implication of the proposal is that the holidays
for students will be about two weeks longer than for the teachers. This may
appear as a loss of teaching time. But the gain in terms of quality of work
will compensate it in full or even more.
(6)
Reports of the annual plan prepared in the beginning of the year should be
available to the inspecting officer within a short time thereof. The same
should be done about the evaluation carried out at the end of the year. It
should be an important part of the school inspection to discuss these plans and
their evaluation with the school staff and authorities (and where necessary,
even with students).
(7)
The State Education Departments should be oriented to a new mode of thinking.
Their present insistence on rigidity and uniformity should be abandoned in
favour of an elastic and dynamic approach. They should also encourage
initiative, creativity, freedom and experimentation on the part of institutions
and teachers. It should be their responsibility to identify good schools and to
give them greater support and larger freedom to enable them to become better
while, at the same time, providing the necessary guidance and direction to the
weaker institutions with a view to enabling them to become good.
(8)
Although the institutional plans have to emphasise human efforts rather than
additional investment in physical and monetary terms, it is also necessary to
emphasise that the State Governments should strive to make more and more
resources available to individual institutions through liberalisation of
grants. Side by side, it is equally essential that every institution should
strive to raise its own resources for its development. From this point of view.
the following three steps will have to be taken :
(a)
An Education Fund should be maintained in each educational institution, on the
broad lines recommended by the Education Commission. The Commission has said
that this fund should consist of (i) amounts placed at the disposal of the institutions
by the local authorities; (ii) donations and contributions voluntarily made by
the parents and the local community; (iii) a betterment fund levied in
institutions other than primary schools from students; and (iv) grant-in-aid
given, on a basis of equalisation, by the State Government.
(b)
The system of grant-in-aid should be reformed to encourage excellence. The
grant-in-aid to educational institutions should be divided into two parts. The
first is the ordinary maintenance grant on some egalitarian principles which
will ensure the payment of teachers' salaries and a certain minimum expenditure
for other items. But there should also be a special 'Development Grant' given
to institutions on the basis of their performance. This will promote a
competition for excellence among the different educational institutions and lay
the foundation of a movement which, in the course of time, would succeed in
raising standards all round.
(c)
A deliberate policy to encourage the pursuit of excellence should be adopted.
At the school stage, good schools should be allowed to develop into
'experimental schools' and freed from the shackles of external examinations. A
similar step should be taken at the university stage by the development of
'autonomous colleges'. Encouragement of assistance should be given to
outstanding departments of universities to grow into Centres of Advanced Study
and in some universities at least, clusters of Centres of Advanced Study should
be built up in related disciplines that strengthen and support one another.
(9)
The different educational institutions should help each other in developing
this new concept of institutional plans. From this point of view, the
programmes of 'school complexes' recommended by the Education Commission
deserves consideration. Under this programme, each secondary school will work
in close collaboration with the primary schools in its neighborhood and help
them, through guidance services and sharing of facilities, to improve
themselves. The same process can be repeated at a higher level between colleges
and universities on the one hand and the secondary schools in their neighborhood
on the other. At present, the teachers at different stages of education are
engaged in a dialogue of mutual recrimination and passing the buck. For
instance, the universities blame the secondary schools for sending up weak
students and the secondary schools pass on the blame to primary schools. The
programme of school complexes recommended by the Education Commission will put
an end to all this and bring the different stages of education together in a
programme of mutual service and support.
(10)
One more point needs emphasis in this context. The success of a programme of
institutional planning will be directly proportional to the extent to which the
teachers working in an institution identify themselves with its development. In
private schools, this identification is easier to be achieved because the
teachers remain nontransferable. In fact, where a private institution is in a
position to attract competent and dedicated teachers and give them an effective
hand in its administration, the programme of institutional planning is likely
to be the most successful. Every private institution should therefore strive to
this end, namely, to attract competent and dedicated teachers and to give them
an effective voice in running the institution. In Government or Local Bodies
institutions, the position is a little different. Here the teachers belong to a
cadre and not to the institution and are liable to be transferred to several
other institutions of the same type. In practice, such transfers are also
fairly frequent. The teachers therefore, develop loyalties to a cadre rather
than to individual institutions. It will therefore be necessary to adopt
policies under which teachers working in Government or Local Authority schools
also could be enabled to identify themselves with individual institutions. This
can be done by creating committees of managements or boards of governors for
individual institutions, by reducing transfers to the minimum and by giving
the teachers working in these institutions an effective voice in their
development.
LEADERSHIP
The leadership
id the preparation and implementation
of institutional plans will have to be provided, to begin with, by the
inspecting officers of the State Education Departments. They will also have a
continuous and an important role to play in this programme. It is, however,
obvious that the essential leadership in preparation and implementation of
institutional plans will have to be provided by the teachers themselves. From
this point of view, some programmes that could be adopted at the different
stages of education are suggested below.
(1)
Primary Schools : A very difficult problem is the preparation of plans
for primary schools, especially single-teacher schools. The first step to
this end will be to train primary teachers and headmasters in this task. This
itself is a formidable task, in view of the numbers involved. But this will not
be enough and it will be necessary to provide them with continuous guidance and
assistance. For this purpose, it is necessary to adopt the scheme of school
complexes recommended by the Education Commission. Each school complex will
include a high/higher secondary school as its centre and all the primary
schools within an area of three to five miles of the central secondary schools.
All these institutions should be treated as a unit for purposes of educational planning
and development and an attempt should be made to regard it as a 'living cell'
in education. It will generally be a small and a manageable group of teachers
which can function in a face-to-face relationship within easily accessible
distance; and it will also have the essential talent needed because there would
be about half a dozen trained graduates within it. This group of teachers can
easily help each other and ensure that the primary schools included within the
group will prepare and implement satisfactorily plans of their own.
(2)
Secondary Schools : The guidance to the secondary schools in preparing
and implementing institutional plans of their own will be provided partly by
the secondary teachers themselves and partly by the college and university
teachers. It is desirable that there should be a secondary school headmasters'
forum in each district; and it should be a responsibility of this forum,
working through its members, to give guidance to the secondary schools to
prepare and implement their plans. Similarly, we may also create a
school-complex at a higher level by linking a college or university department
with a number of high/higher secondary schools within its neighbour hood. The
teachers of the college or the university department concerned can then work
with the teachers of the secondary schools in their area and guide them in the
preparation and implementation of their plans.
(4)
Panel Inspections : Yet another method under which teachers can provide guidance in
preparation and implementation of the plans of primary and secondary schools is
to adopt the system of 'panel inspections' recommended by the Education
Commission. At present all inspections of primary and secondary schools are
carried out by departmental officers on an annual basis. While this should
continue, the Commission has recommended that we should supplement it with a
system of panel inspections of primary and secondary schools to be carried out
every three to five years. Each panel will consist of a group of selected teachers
or headmasters (including the headmaster of the school to be inspected) and
may have a departmental officer as its secretary. The panel should spend a
longish time in each institution so that it is able to evaluate its work and
give proper guidance. The principal advantage of this system of panel
inspection is that it will make the experience and expertise of senior and
competent teachers available to all others.
(5)
Colleges : The colleges will be in a position, without much difficulty, to prepare
and implement their plans. The guidance needed by them should be given by the
universities.
(5)
Universities : The universities should prepare and implement plans of
their own and for this purpose, they should set up Academic Planning Boards on
the lines recommended by the Education Commission. These should consist of
representatives of the university, along with some persons from other
universities and a few distinguished and experienced persons in public life.
The Boards should be responsible for advising the university on its long-term
plans and for generating new ideas and new programmes and for periodic
evaluation of the work of the universities.
I would like to make two
more observations in the end. The first is that the techniques of educational
planning, and education itself, will improve if we combine 'freedom' with
'confrontation'. We should allow each school freedom to develop a plan of its
own ; and then we should bring the schools together and confront the whole body
of the schools with the good work which some school is doing. There is no such
thing as a reform imposed from above. No one learns from the supervisors but
the schools learn from themselves. And the supervisor's role is to make the
schools confront each other, so that the good work in one becomes known to the
others.
My second observation is that although institutional
planning may be a new description, it is not a new idea. Some of the
outstanding institutions we have among us, are the results of the vision and
toil of men and women who looked ahead of their times, visualised the future of
the institutions and planned for the morrow. When this vision is shared by the
community and institutions are developed and improved through the full
participation and involvement of the community in this endeavour, we are only
democratising and systematising this.
