Page:SELECTED ESSAYS of Dr. S. S. KALBAG.pdf/10

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the work-based curriculum Pabal has promoted (or at least aims at promoting) for the school system of tomorrow's India. Apart from being a scientist and educator, Dr. Kalbag was both a sensitive and intense person in the best sense of these terms. I would contend that these values of his personality were critical elements of his pedagogy that enabled him to evolve a radical vision of education. Otherwise, he would have made compromises at a much earlier stage of his work. I recall a meeting at the Indian Institute of Education at Pune when he broke down, just as a child would, in the midst of academics when some of us questioned his approach to introducing information technology in village curriculum as being premature. He explained later that the villages would be left behind if they don't get access to this technology. Time has shown that he was correct but probably ahead of his times. He contended that "we need to develop courage to act on our convictions and be willing to pay the price." His work at Pabal is a living testimony to this conviction and his early demise, probably, is the price he paid. Had he lived, I would have liked him to pursue two additional curricular issues. One, like the scientific framework, it was important that Pabal also included framework of other disciplines, especially social science and linguistics, in developing the work-based curriculum. This would have made the curriculum holistic. Two, while learning from work and experience is invaluable at early stages of learning and it constitutes an essential entry point for the majority of our children, it can't be promoted as a substitute for learning from the accumulated human knowledge as the child advances in both the age and maturity. Often, in our over-enthusiasm we make this unintended mistake. There is plenty of evidence in Dr. Kalbag's papers that he was acutely aware of this limitation of work-based learning and, therefore, he raised philosophical issues of great Rural Development Through Education System 5