Introduction
I
The children of today are different in the sense that they are:
a) Future-oriented;
b) They tend to be more and more comprehensive, global and universal;
c) They attach a great value to the virtues of friendship and commitment to the relations that are rooted in impartiality, team spirit and freedom from rigidities of conventions, dogmas and all the conflicts of ideologies that prevent free inquiry leading up to discoveries and inventions that will sub-serve the ideals of mutuality and harmony;
d) Their boundaries tend to be crossed by travels and fresh experiences, and
e) They insist on integrality between profession and practices; they are natural critics of pretence and preaching, and they appreciate achievements and realizations.
The teachers of today and tomorrow have to be different; their roles have to be more stringent and multisided, devoted to the development of integral personality, wide visions of the future of nationalism and internationalism, and capable to fulfill the role of the teacher as exemplar, as a friend, philosopher and guide, as a scientist, psychologist, artist and technologist, and above all, an ideal communicator who can spread uplifting influence by process of awakening and inspiration and contagious enthusiasm.
Teachers of today and tomorrow need to have new programmes of training, which will take care of new roles of the teachers and new trends of the synthesis of East and the West, and as agents of change from old to the new.
II
An increasing number of leaders of thought and action have begun to inquire deeply into the maladies of our times and it is increasingly realized that these maladies are results of a disequilibrium between the ideals that mankind has been labouring to formulate during the recent centuries and the disconcerting actualities which refuse obstinately to change. With the passing of every decade, we seem to be coming nearer to a point where the realisation of the ideals will become imperative and where, at the same time, it will seem impossible to accomplish this realisation. In other words, we seem to be hading to an acute crisis.
A huge structure is being built up with an increasing insistence on efficiency needed for industrialized society, leaving practically no room for the growth of profounder human and spiritual consciousness which alone can rightly and wisely guide human volition in taking decisions in the critical times that seem to lie ahead of us. While under the pressure of the technological development, the world is shrinking, and we are dreaming of the possibility of a planetary civilization, we have not yet the required corresponding psychological development which can enable the human consciousness to sustain such a planetary civilization. On the contrary, there is a growing preponderance of those impulses which can thrive only through ignorance, fragmentation, discord and violence.
As we study the situation, we feel convinced that it is a vain chimera to believe that the world can be changed without a radical change in the human consciousness. It seems, therefore, right and just that the wisest leaders of today have declared unambiguously that the future of the human race is dependent exclusively upon a radical transformation of human consciousness and that one of the most important means of effecting this transformation is an integral and value-oriented education.
Happily during the first decades of the 20th century, some of the greatest educationists of India devoted their life-time to the actualization of the needed new educational system. The fruits of their pioneering experiments are available to us, even though they have not been sufficiently acknowledged or appreciated.
All these initiatives and experiments have been bold and great and inspiring, and all of them are still at various stages of growth and development; great lessons have to be learnt from these experiments, and we have here a great fund of educational research that can guide us in the tasks of value-oriented education and of the entire transformation of our educational system. Value-orientation should be the central focus of education and teachers should be given the necessary training in the effective methods of development of values among students and teachers.
(to be continued….)