While writing a discourse on education, Rabindra Nath Tagore mentioned, “Education means enabling the mind to find out that ultimate truth which emancipates us from the bondage of dust and gives us wealth of not things but inner light, not of power but of love, making this truth its even and giving expression to it”. In broadest sense, any act or experience that has formative effect on mind, character and physical ability of an individual can be called as educational. It is in this sense that travelling, reading, conversation or even living with someone may be an education. But education may also connote a system of institutions organized by society to deliberately transmit its cultural heritage- its accumulated knowledge, values and skills- from one generation to another. The educational system of a society would, therefore, comprise institutions such as schools, colleges, universities including teachers, administrators, curricula, and courses, examination and certification procedure, and so on.

In the educational system, the higher education occupies a special position of any nation because it is at the top of the entire educational structure and thus, influences practically every important national activity Through ideas and innovation, its influence on the future of the nation is considerable. Higher education refers to education in post higher secondary institutions, colleges and universities. It is called higher education because of it is concerned with the topmost stage of formal education and importantly, because it is concerned with processes in the more advanced phases of human learning. The social, economic and industrial developments have created pressure towards greater: specialization, formal and institutionalized system and research. Bertrand Russell's thought on aims of education in different societies was:

After India became free and set about the task of reorienting its educational system to suit the needs and aspirations of an independent nation committed to democracy, secularism, and socialism, widespread discussion took place on the aims and purposes of higher education. In the words of Dr. S. Radhakrishnan,“ If India is to confront the confusion of our times, she must turn for guidance not from those who are lost to the exigencies of passing hour but to her men of letters and men of science, to her poets and artists, to her discovers and inventors. These intellectual pioneers of civilization are to be found and trained in the universities, which are the minor sanctuaries of life of the nation.”

Kothari commission (1964–66) set out the aims of university education in following terns:

Policies and programs are to be in the line with social purposes to foster unity in diversity, to produce community of values, freedom of belief and expression of all citizens and with deep obligation to human wellbeing. Vocational and technical education with conscience and without moral vacuum should strive to preserve the values of democracy, justice and liberty, equality and fraternity. Universities must stand for these ideals which can never be lost so long as men seek wisdom and follow righteousness.

The commission also set out the following as the functions of the universities:

To seek and cultivate new knowledge, to fearlessly pursue truth by interpreting old knowledge in the light of new needs and discoveries by providing right kind of leadership. Competent men and women trained in all professions with a sense of social purpose of justice and equality would work for reducing social and cultural differences so as to infuse attitude and values for good life.

In the advent of globalization and linking education to industry; certain changes in the basic aims of the universities are in the offing. The traditional degree program would increasingly be replaced by continuous and lifelong learning, more teaching than research would take place where teachers would become facilitators. They would cease to be the main transmitters of the bodies of knowledge. Different forms of knowledge generation would take place to suit diversified student population with varied mechanism of delivery of that knowledge.

Education has played an important part in preparing men for life in the society and molding them accordingly, whether directly or indirectly, overtly or covertly. Improvement in human mind with its potential powers of rational thought and ability came to be regarded as the key to human progress. Men of enlightenment saw cognitive development and the pursuit of knowledge as essential not only for survival but also for the advancement of the society itself. Sociologists like Durkheim argued that changes in the society always preceded changes in the educational system. He emphasized that educational transformations were always the result and the symptoms of social transformation in terms of which they were to be explained.

There has been a close relationship between education and economy in all historical periods. In the days of subsistence economy, the traditional knowledge was being passed on to the generation to generation. When improved production led to availability of leisure, at least for some people, more formal schooling came to existence. In the recent times even in the economically developed countries, in spite of high level of education available to the people; cultivating people was so much emphasized that the concern for social impact of education and hence, the economic impact was either ignored or underplayed. Education for the sake of education-education and educated were living in an ivory tower distant from the mundane problems of life. Of late, economists have started to measure the benefits of education by statistical means and by qualifying the monetary benefits in terms of lifetime earning capacity of an individual. This totally ignores the non-monetary part such as social influence, capacity to master destiny etc.

There is little to doubt that education is an extremely important coast for economic growth. On the other hand, economic growth furthers educational expansion and efficiency through national productivity, accumulation of capital and saving for investment into the system. Improvement of human resources is not limited to the inculcation of skills and knowledge, but includes having attitudes, values, and motives consistent with goals and methods of development plans. Here, education works as a major vehicle to bring about social and psychological changes necessary for the improvement of the productive labor.

When we look at the relationship between education and social and economic class structure even in the earliest beginnings of education such as slave societies, slaves were not only deprived of education, but they were also prohibited entering the system. In the feudal society too, education was confined to the gentry; whereas the people from farming communities got some education but rarely did they reach the higher level of education. In India lower castes remained deprived or deficient in education for so long that special provisions had to be made in the constitution to give them concessions in education and then in employment. After Second World War and the liberation of dozens of countries from colonial dependency, education started slowly being perceived as a catalyst of social transformation through quantity and quality of education for the socially disadvantaged. But it could hardly break the traditional linkages of caste, education and occupation. But, despite limitations and constraints, as argued by Padma Velaskar (1994), the acquisition of higher education by Dalits has resulted in positive social, political, and cultural images which are manifested in variety of tangible and intangible forms. Such was the importance of education accorded to Dr. Baba Saheb Ambedkar that, once he said, “coming as I do from the lowest order of the Hindu society, I know what is the value of education. The problem of moving the lower order is deemed to be economic. This is a great mistake. The problem of raising the lower order in India is not to feed them, to clothe them, and make them serve the higher order as is the ancient idea of this country. The problem of the lower order is to remove from them that inferiority complex which has stunted them their growth and made them slaves to others, to create in them the consciousness of the significance of their lives for themselves and for the country, of which they have been cruelly robbed by the existing social order Nothing can achieve this except the spread of higher education.”

Education, from the point of view of the society, is a process of transmission of culture. By culture, we need to mean much more than mere art, music and literature. It refers to the total way of life of a society- its knowledge, beliefs, attitudes, values, skills and behavior patterns. Education can be considered as the mechanism by which society inducts its members into its ways of life and beliefs. It is partially responsible for the transfer from the generation to the next society's beliefs, values, sentiments, knowledge and pattern of behavior. The process of socialization is conservative in that it perpetuates current cultural patterns and discourages deviation from them. However, ways of life, concepts of decency and beliefs are not monolithic; they may change with region and historical origin of a group of population; they may be different for the various classes in the same social groups. Since there is no unanimity regarding what culture is, educational provision for different social and ethnic groups and need for diversity for educational provisions is called for. It becomes important in a class, poverty, unemployment and dissatisfaction ridden society like ours, that the content of education is relevant to lives of its citizens and their ‘Outside the school experiences’ so that alienation from and rejection of education does not take place. It is observed that education, in recent times, has been under tremendous pressure to ensure social integration. Social integration is considered dependent on a founding system of norms and values shared by the vast majority of a society. Consequently, it is necessary to make an appeal to the educators to make sure that the future members of the society embrace and internalize those values. As said by Hobsbawm, “… with the collapse of communism, the past no longer remains as a guide for the future and what has gone before no longer provides a credible model for the next”.

Development seems to connote different things to different people: from economic growth to imbibing modern values and attitudes to a society moving towards greater equality and social justice. Each of these connotations seems to be derived from certain theory or ideology. Thus whenever one talks about social or national development, one seems to make a set of theoretical and ideological assumptions. We may attempt to analyze such ideological assumptions.

After the World War II, the USA was the only nation on either side of the war which had its infrastructure of roads, buildings, bridges and banks intact. It could, therefore, place itself at the top of the world power structure. But, without functioning economies to buy their products, their growth prospects were limited. They were worried for the impending social unrest from widespread poverty in a world of modernity. They were also to contain communism and debunking it as a path to development. So, they started aiding Europe and Asia. Development theorists attempted to analyze the cause of poverty and came out that poorer nations were poor because they lacked big capital, technology and, modern social organization and values. The proponents of the theory, W. W.Rostow, Samuel Hustington, Daniel Lerner and McClelland, saw modernization as a process; a social, psychological, economic, and political and, even a biological sequence of change. They prescribed that nations should focus on changing their internal society by rationalizing it; many suggested that developed countries could play pivotal role assisting and guiding nations those were on the way to progress.

After two decades of dominance in development circles, modernization theory came under attack from several angles: it was seen to be not historical, and failed to make distinction among countries, regions, structural conditions or specific past experiences. The term ‘modernization’ was criticized as a euphemism for ‘americanization’ and labeled to be ethnocentric and pro-capitalist.

In the beginning of late 1950s, from a growing number of scholars and planners in the Latin America emerged a theory to propound that because of colonial and neocolonial relationships, the ‘third world’ had been kept in a subordinate position to Europe serving as merely a source of cheap raw material and a market for more expensive manufactured goods. They paid special attention to savage the inequalities in poor nations done through a system of exclusion and repression of masses. In the bipolar world, the rich exploited poor countries through coercive power, low wage and undermined independent labor unions and social movements. However, the initial splash of development theory did not last long.

From the earliest social theorists through dependency theorists, the literature on social change and development was largely associated with industrialization and the gaps between wealthier and poorer nations. Of late, building factories and infrastructure is no longer perceived important to raise the well-being of a nation. Rather control over information, technology and banking institutions is considered the deciding factor. The processes of globalization have made the parts of the world interdependently integrated. Beyond the increase in trade and globally organized production, the control of decision making has been shifted to a new ‘largely accountable political and economic elite’ such as ‘Wall Street, US treasury-IMF/World Bank complex’.

Debt has played an important role in the globalization process. Poorer nations took heavy loans in 1960s and 1970s to build their industrial infrastructure to catch up with wealthier nations. The rates of interest were largely adjustable and an increase in the US interest rates exponentially increased their debt burden. Slowly poorer nations were dragged to the debt trap. Those heavily indebted nations had to resort to sweeping changes in: food, transport and housing subsidies, privatization of state owned industries and tariff barriers (lowering of) to force local players to compete with multinational corporations on equal footing. These sweeping changes were called structural adjustment program and remained the subjects of intense debate for over two decades. This brought to the fore the fact that no single form social organization would be able to provide a template of what it means to be ‘developed’ It argued that it was not the economy that determined culture, but culture would drive the economic change.

Without a universally accepted definition, one thing has become clear that development would mean growth plus change and, something beyond the economic widening process. Although the increase in real income per head can be adopted as the primary goal for development but it is interpreted through a number of sub-goals like alleviation of poverty, reduction of economic inequality, minimum level of consumption, certain composition of consumption stream, maximum level of tolerable unemployment, avoidance of market disparities in the prosperity and growth of different regions within a country. Sustainable and equitable development without affecting the next generation through environmental damage would certainly be considered important for development. We should not mistake economic welfare as development. It is just a part of social welfare. Some aspects of human welfare would suffer if relations that were once personal become impersonal, structure and function of the family change, stability gets disrupted and support and assurance of traditional values disappear. Increasing focus on quality of development with renewed emphasis on reducing incidence of poverty would accord importance in the development process. Keeping in the view of the democratic policy and socialistic aspirations, the country needs to cater to the needs of the entire population on the basis of its full participation in the process of development. A country with over one third of the population living below Rs 12 a day, nearly half illiterate, prevalence of prejudices based on gender, caste, community, and language has to manage peace and amity if it is to ensure social and economic justice for all.

Further, the issues related to education and development can not be resolved without taking into account the role of the state. At the same time, whenever one chooses to view the State, it seems inevitable that the State is never neutral irrespective of the type of economic or level of development. As the goals of both education and development are inherently political; it would be pertinent to know what kind of education would be appropriate for what kind of development, for what purpose and what development strategies to implement.

Globally, the entire knowledge business has undergone tremendous changes during the past 40 years. Within the university system itself, there is considerable expansion in research infrastructure and number of people involved in it. In terms of research coverage, newer areas are being brought under the purview of research both basic and applied. The changing scenario in developing countries like India is that of greater dependence of the economy on knowledge-based industries and knowledge-oriented employment. The narrowing gap between theory and practice, which was discussed, earlier is clearly visible in the agricultural sector; where the results of research done in the labs have been taken to some extent, to the land so as to produce all the grain, oil seeds or cotton it needed. Thus more and more responsibility gets vested in the higher education institutions in providing the two crucial factors for development: knowledge and human resources.

Every young nation like ours attaches priority to the development of certain minimum capabilities in the area of science and technology, industry and defense, and self-sufficiency in certain basic commodities such as food, medicine, building, and clothing material and, energy. Such self reliance reduces vulnerability of a nation to international pressure in the matter of crucial decisions pertaining to economic development and even national security. Another driving force for change is their desire to convert from the position of raw material supplier to supplier of finished goods. Of late, there has been a considerable effort to tie education and development. Human and material growth will be imagined somewhat like construction enterprises in domains of different nature, and a trade off between investment in material and human capital by making people adjuncts to economic growth, next to plant capacity, raw material and credit.

But, all major social changes get originated in the minds of the people. Such people provide leadership to the society at certain junctures. By and large such people are the products of higher education particularly of the universities. A democracy owes its dynamism essentially from two professional communities: one, the academics and two, the journalists. The universities’ role for social change, therefore, can never be over-emphasized. Can this university community develop the ability to act as a watch dog for the society by nurturing within itself a climate in which both dissent and discipline coexist? In a country like ours where there exist just seven graduates in a thousand populations, the university community comprising both teachers and students should be viewed as the catalyst of development rather than being a “class of pensions, Indian in blood and color but English (foreigner) in taste, in opinion, in morals and intellect”.

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