நாட்டுக் கல்வி நலமுற 79 days of the British Raj. The British believed in the ‘downward filtration theory’ under which education and culture would inevitably flow from the classes to the masses. They kept the common people away from education, and education away from life. But things have not much changed since they left. Even today the principal beneficiaries of our education, are the upper and middle classes. To them also we give a wrong education. Our formal system remains confined to textbooks four walls of a school or college. It is tied down to textbooks and examinations. Even then the books are unreadable and the examinations totally unreliable. The courses of study are so framed that the students are not equipped with any productive skills. Whatever education they receive cuts them off from their natural and social environment. They become aliens to their own community. They lose faith in life itself. What Jayaparakashji wrote in 1978 still holds ture. According to him “it also converts them into a parasitic class which Perpectuates and even intensifies the poverty of the masses. The system has failed to promote individual growth. It also bccomes more of a hindrance than a help to bring about. an egalitarian transformation'. If this be true, can we say that we have basically departed from the Macaulay tradition? And, if this is what our education has donc to us, one may well ask, is not to education better than bad education? The othr important reason is that our education has been a routine sectoral activity left to the initiative aud judgement of specialists at the desk, controlled
