WORKING SCHOOLS FOR WORKERS
Workers on the organized sector have very few incentives and many heavy disincentives for seeking help with literacy difficulties. Literacy evaluation of a worker is seldom linked with evaluation of work efficiency nor the worker's role in cooperative development. Patronage and subsidy to the workers' education including literacy is not seen by the worker as organically linked with the work ethics of the firm or with its role as a responsible citizen. On the contrary, voluntary revelation of their difficulty in reading, writing or spelling, is likely no only to lead a loss of face with the fellow workers, but to greater exploitation and threat of loss of work. Therefore, workers education must cater to the personal circumstances of workers and must be closely associated with their education and training for work.
Adults with literacy difficulties are in the main doing manual or unskilled work. They being below their potential, the normal system does not cater to their needs. The management which at times provides for vocational training or retaining is interested in the worker completing a set course. It is, therefore, essential that all vocational and industrial training institutions have a literacy wing and literacy become a compulsory component of further education and training. The dichotomy between education and training marginalizes the disadvantaged. Unless employers, trade unions, educationists and trainers recognise that literacy is a prerequisite of vocational education and training, the artificial dichotomy will continue and the working adults will not fulfill their potential as workers and be effective in their jobs.
It is important to emphasize the integration of different programme structures of workers education with recurrent systems of education. It is not an easy task. The child labour in skilled areas as carpet weaving, the women labour employed for tea or coffee picking or making incense sticks, the adult illiterate labour in an unskilled job or as a trade union worker have different needs. In all urban centres workers are drawn from different linguistic, ethnic and religious backgrounds and often do not even see their role as member of a responsible work force. Their education seldom give them introduction to the development perspective of the country or cooperative development strategies in management and citizenry.
There are educational theories which treat the child as a social and the learner's mind as an empty bucket to be filled with the wisdom of the teacher. As Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi rightly points out, "we cannot bring in the institutionalized learning at the cost of destroying the intelligence and the wisdom that are already in our people. We must preserve them and together with them bringing institutionalized learning, bring in literacy which will help our people from being gullible, being exploited. It liberates them from servitude". This is a challenge to all those who produce material for literacy and education for workers, children as well as adults.
India's massive adult education programme has many spectacular achievements to its credit. But its Achilles heel is the fact that it is run without reference to the language of the learners. That literacy is primarily a language problem, that language is the medium of education and training has been forgotten by the adult educators. Since everybody speaks a language, it is taken for granted that everyone is competent to speak about it.
One of the major tasks before us is the evaluation of all books used by Sramik Vidyapeeths round the country. Evaluation is a job for specialists. Institutions such as Central Institute of Indian Languages, which is the greatest repository of research and application in the fields of languages, linguistics and evaluation should be formally associated to avoid the tardiness in implementation. How can the Prime Minister's directive to forge many linkages be implemented if we don not shed the old habit of working in isolation?
The Institute of Applied Language Sciences has just completed evaluation of books prepared by the NCERT in 11 Indian languages funded by the UNICEF. About 35 specialists worked for about a year which has resulted in the production of a Handbook useful for material producers, teachers, teacher trainers and evaluators. Similar books will be ready for each of the languages. Such work should be the model for subsequent work.