Instilling a Citizenship Awareness into Education

Education is the most important field from the long range point of view, for national health and welfare. This field has suffered from the mercenary attitude as much as any other field. The inculcation of the citizenship attitude, and the temper of the social responsibility it involves, into the world of our education, should be given the highest priority by all our political parties. This positive and wholesome influence of the political parties on education in place of the current wholly unwholesome and harmful influence, will have a revolutionary impact on our education. It will strengthen the ever-present positive and elevating influences of the still existing small minority of teachers and students, who are patriotic and dedicated but who now feel suffocated and helpless. We can well imagine what democratic health would come to the nation if a sizeable section, if not all, of our teachers, from the primary to the university levels, would achieve this revolutionary change from the mercenary to the citizenship awareness, and instill the same into all the millions of our students, and instill also into them that love of knowledge and character-excellence, both of which have been serious casualties during these thirty post-freedom years.


EXTRACTS FROM: Eternal Values for a Changing Society Volume IV - Democracy for Total Human Fulfilment; 1 - Enlightened citizenship and our democracy (Pg:40-41; ed. 1993)
This was the inaugural address at the Symposium on Enlightened Citizenship organized by the Ramakrishna Mission, New Delhi - held on April 27, 1980.