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Unit 16: Promoting Need based Educational Programmes

Need for and Objectives of Adult Education Notes
Some of the important factors which call for the promotion of adult education are given here.
1. Development and enrichment of an individual : Through adult education, deficiencies in
earlier formal education must be made good.
2. Participation in social life : Adult education should enable every adult to be able to equip
himself or herself to play as full part as he or she wishes to take in social and civic life.
3. Strengthening national integration : It can also be a means of creating better understanding.
4. Development of worthy leisure time activities : Adult education is needed to enable every
adult to have the opportunity of discovering how he or she can most satisfyingly and recreatively
use his or her leisure.
5. Preservation and promotion of culture : Adult education is needed for the preservation and
promotion of culture.
6. Mutual tolerance : Adult education is needed to promote international understanding, mutual
sympathy and tolerance of different points of view and to put every adult in the way of arriving
at the truth.
7. Adult education and vocational efficiency : Adult education should enable everyone to study
his or her role as a parent and member of a community; as a wage earner and as a responsible
citizen. It must also give opportunities for vocational employment.
8. Adult literacy and economic growth : Adult literacy, an essential element in overall development,
must be closely linked to economic and social priorities and to present and future manpower
needs.
9. Awakening in the people of an appreciation of Five-Year Plans : One of the essential functions
of adult education is to awaken in the people an appreciation of the significance of the country’s
Five-Year Plans and to enthuse them for participation in it.
10. Adult education for a changing world : The development of the modern world, the accession
to independence of a large number of countries, the need for the real emancipation of people
and for the increasingly active and productive participation in the economic, social and political
life of human society, of the hundreds of millions of illiterate adults still existing in the world,
make it essential to change national education policies.
11. Knowledge of the basic skills : It is an important and traditional function of adult education
to bring knowledge to the people especially the knowledge which concerns them deeply, e.g.,
knowledge of the basic essentials of a healthy life, civic education, etc. As a large part of the
Indian population is illiterate, literacy has become one of the most important programmes of
social education and is an index of its progress.
12. Improvement in the quality of leadership and followership : Men everywhere function in
group and a distinctive group is a cluster of people around a leader. The quality of a group is
therefore largely a product of its leadership and if the Indian people have to justify their
aspirations, this can be done only by improving the quality of leadership in the villages and
towns of India. This is a responsibility which adult education alone can shoulder.
13. Benefits of new knowledge : Since India has resolved to recover her place in technology in
response to the demands of modern times, it is the function of adult education to serve as a
smooth and effective channel between centres of research and the homes and hamlets in which
the common people live. It aims to bring down to the people the benefits of new knowledge
that is being continually created in laboratories and also the knowledge that is already there,
but is not available to them.
14. Achievement of the objectives of Universal Elementary Education (UEE) : An educated adult
is quite sensitive to the importance of promoting UEE of the children under his care and charge.

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