Adult Education -Adult Literacy
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Introduction: The smooth working of the democratic Government and other institutions suffer to a great extent because of India’s backwardness in education.
Most of the people are not conscious of their rights, and duties because of the lack of proper education and awareness. It is with the educated and enlightened people alone that the country can progress in all directions. In our country, adult illiteracy poses a serious problem and hence, the need of adult education.
The problem of adult illiteracy: Indian economy mainly depends upon agriculture. The working class constitutes a great part of it. Most parents of this class of people are not in favor of sending their children to school. Even when they come to school, they become drip-outs and help their parents in tending cattle and doing many other works to add to family income.
Sometimes, illiterate, unemployed people run to the towns and cities to work as laborers in industries and factories. They do not like to go back to the villages to get skilled in various ancestral trades and professions and work for a living.
The need of adult education or literacy: This is due to lack of education, learning and proper consciousness. When they are educated, they can take an active part in the development of their country-side in various fields and ensure the progress of the country.
In India, many adult people are illiterate. They cannot read or write. They are not able to develop their sense of awareness of many things that would help them in life. With a view to marking these people literate, emphasis has been put on adult education.
Night schools are being organized in the slum areas in towns and cities and in undeveloped rural areas. Vigorous campaigns are launched to make the adult illiterates realize their aim in life.
Conclusion: The illiterate adults should realize that they should be responsible citizens in a democracy. An illiterate person cannot perform his duties properly.
It is not enough to enable them how to read and write, they must know what they are expected to do as citizens of this great country. There should be continuous Post-literacy programme, so that they do not forget what they have learnt and keep themselves, up-to-date about the developments in the country.
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Adult Education
In India, education has been provided to a few fortunate people and this has widened the gap between a few literate and millions of illiterate people in India. Since the population of the country is so large, it has been a very difficult task to educate all the people of India.
It has been estimated that by 2010 AD, 40% of the world’s illiterate people will be found in India alone. There are still about 55,000 villages in India that do not have a primary school.
Adult education has now become a great necessity in India. It is obvious that an adult will be interested in studying only that which can help him with his occupation. He won’t be interested in learning from scratch and that too all those subjects that can never help him with the earning of his livelihood.
The Adult education programme was first launched in 1978. It now covers 94,000 Centres with the involvement of the Centre, the State, Universities, Nehru Yuvak Kendra etc. About 300 Adult education centres under the rural functional literacy scheme with an enrolment of 30 adults in each were constituted in one district in every state during 1979-83.
This means that in each state only 9,000 adults have been educated over a period of 5 years. Even as a demonstration effort, this is far too insignificant.
There are too many people who are still illiterate in this country. The success of this programmes depends upon the implementation of the results of a systematic research done in the field of non-formal education.
The television, radio, video systems, films etc. are of great use as visual aids to help in these adult education programmes. One should not be discouraged by the high costs that are incurred while implementing these programmes because the long term benefits derived from them will be much more than the burden of these high costs.
