Temjenkaba
In our culturally plural society, Education should foster universal and eternal values, oriented towards the unity and integration of our people. Value education should help eliminate obscurantism, religious fanatics, violence, superstition and fatalism. Apart from this combative role, value education has a profound positive content, based on our heritage, national goals and universal perceptions.
Good education is, in essence, a process of developing the human personality in all its dimensions-intellectual, physical, social, moral and spiritual. When we talk of “value education” we wish to draw attention to these dimensions of education. Education in its true sense should heighten a person’s awareness of one self and one’s relationship with outside world of nature and with other human beings. Value education, then, is to be looked upon as an aspect of the overall qualitative improvement of education.
By value education we refer to planned education aimed at the development of proper attitudes, values, emotions and character. It is a process of helping the individual to think freely and critically and act responsively and with courage and conviction. As such, the process of value education calls into play all human faculties – knowing, feeling and doing. The content of value education can be approached from two angles, the individual and the social. One could put the individual human being at the center and think of values as so many adornments that could eventually lead to making of the “good person”, variously conceived either as an embodiment of personal purity or as a self-realised perfected pattern on the other hand. The social context is where an individual has to function and it has to be the guiding principles and norms in helping the individual to deal with the social reality. Social reality which affects the life of the individual in which society, in turn gets affected by the individual’s responses to it. It is primarily this encounter of the modern human beings with the world outside and within oneself that should determine the specific values which should be transmitted through the educational process.
Regarding our present society, we are experiencing a crisis of values in all fields-social, political, economic life, which give a special force and point to the entire question of education and values. Disregard shown to basic values like honesty and tolerance both in personal and public life has become a matter of grave national concern. Crime, violence, bloodshed, cruelty, greed, selfishness and service to fellowmen are becoming increasingly rare in our young generation who, not being able to find the meaning or purpose in life, are seeking recourse in such escapist habit as drug-addiction and alcoholism.
Looking at the current situation of our society, the goals of secularism, socialism and democracy have come under severe strain. So what are we to do then? Are we to sit quiet and pretend that the problem does not exist? Or are we to attempt educating ourselves, train in the proper way to be an ideal citizen of the 21st century?
All the problems cannot be effectively tackled through narrow piece meal efforts, educational or social. What we need under the present circumstances is a drastic change in the outlook of man and in his life values. All this calls for a deliberate thrust on value in our education and more intense and concerted educational action for the cultivation of values. Hence there is the need for value education.
(A DIPR Feature)
