Page:SELECTED ESSAYS of Dr. S. S. KALBAG.pdf/6

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FOREWORD Almost a quarter of a century ago, we at Kishore Bharati in Village Palia Piparia, Hoshangabad District, Madhya Pradesh, received a visitor who introduced himself as a senior scientist working with a well-known multi-national company in Mumbai. He was Dr. S.S. Kalbag. He was on a 'pilgrimage' to study and learn from our Hoshangabad Science Teaching Programme (HSTP), then functioning in all the 300 odd government middle schools of the District. Three days later, as he prepared to leave, he sat down with us to share his observations. Although impressed with the scientific philosophy and child-oriented pedagogy that guided the HSTP curriculum, there was something amiss, he frankly observed. He felt that the science curriculum evolved by us was not linked with the real life needs of the rural children and did not address the issues of development, just as the prevailing text book-based curriculum rooted in rote learning fails to do. He wanted to include in his future work all what we had done but begin where we had stopped – that is, go beyond HSTP. Having resigned from his high profile career in Mumbai a few months later, Dr. Kalbag shifted to the Village Pabal in Pune District, Maharashtra and set up his Vigyan Ashram. During the next two decades, he managed to transform Pabal into a new pilgrimage centre of education bubbling with radical ideas for 21* century India. A superficial study of this collection of papers by Late Dr. Kalbag may lead one to falsely conclude that the aim of the Pabal experiment Rural Development Through Education System 1