Need for value education in school

Education is a value and school an instrument to realise it. Education is the norm that the school activities—curricular and co-curricular—must satisfy if their object indeed is education. School activities, in other words, are not ends in themselves. Their sole justification is education. But the grim reality facing schools today is that their agendas are determined and driven not so much by educational aims or curricular objectives as by parental pressures to give their children ‘a good start’ in life in a purely materialistic sense. Nor is the yardstick used for measuring school success and teacher performance in line with the proclaimed educational aims like knowledge and understanding, democratic citizenship, moral character, personal autonomy and creative self-expression. The study of moral and ethical values that make us a perfect person can be considered value-based education. Advocates of value-based education argue that educating students about values is more important than just teaching them algebra, biology, or even literature. Mahatma Gandhi once said that education not only moulds the new generation but also reflects a society's fundamental assumptions about itself and the individuals that compose it. His views are reflected in the following: "The real difficulty is that people have no idea of what education truly is. We assess the value of education in the same manner as we assess the value of land or of shares in the stock exchange market. We want to provide only such education as would enable the student to earn more. We hardly give any thought to the improvement of the character of the educated". Pandit Jawahar Lal Nehru, the first Prime Minister of our country, had said that if all is well with the universities, all would be well with the nation. To build a society with good character and citizenship, it is important that value education is introduced in preschool and reinforced in primary, secondary, and higher education"