Public Authority and Village Reconstruction: The Case of Basic Education in India

Abstract

Some of the writings in the growing literature on the role of education in modernization have dealt with attempts to modify a part or the whole of an educational system. When such attempts for reform have failed (which have happened too often) 1, the profered explanations for the failure have been depressingly similar: there was confusion among administrators and teachers about the objectives of the reform, financial support for the reform program was grossly inadequate, there were not sufficient numbers of truly dedicated and properly trained teachers etc. Often, the crucial weakness of these explanations has been that they did not answer the question: in a given case which explanations were more fundamental than others in explaining a failure? Unless case studies of the failure (or the success) of reform attempts in education differentiate between the more significant from the less significant causes, our understanding of the relationship of educational change to other social, political
and economic changes will remain at a descriptive level.