PUNE: The Union government plans to take up a review of social work institutes to understand what is being imparted and the output, among other matters, along with some other non-mainstream courses, Vinay Sahasrabudhe, chairman of the parliamentary standing committee on education, women, children, and youth & sports, said on Monday.
Sahasrabudhe, also the president of Indian Council for Cultural Relations, was speaking after a function on National Education Policy at Savitribai Phule Pune University.
According to him, the education system has many areas that are not considered part of the mainstream. “Even now arts, science, commerce, engineering and medical courses are considered mainstream. Take the example of architecture and town planning, where we have very few planners. If there are 10 different reasons for the problems faced by any city, one of them will be lack of proper planning. We need to focus on this. We will review town planning and architecture education.
Similarly, there are areas that need attention such as education in fine arts, performing arts and visual arts. Now, we have studied that to an extent and are finalising our report. Another area is social work. Of the total social work institutes in the country, 70% are in Maharashtra. What social work are we teaching, what is happening to them... nobody has focused on them. We will review them,” he said.
Sahasrabudhe appreciated the Maharashtra government’s initiative to reduce the weight of school bags by introducing a single textbook for all subjects for one term. He said he would recommend this plan to the Centre via the parliamentary committee.
The state education department had come up with a one book system on a pilot basis starting this year. According to this, some schools in the state, have integrated books for their Std I students.
“The entire year’s syllabus was divided into four sections and for each term, one book containing all four subjects was developed. This ensures that the student is carrying only one textbook at a time which will greatly reduce the weight of the school bag and also ensure that the student gets to study all subjects every day,” an official from Balbharati said.
