Formal Education, Skill Development and Vocationalisation: The Missing Link in India

Abstract

The contribution of education depends upon the values it teaches and skills impart. Education will become the foundation stone of a sustainable society only if it succeeds in imparting necessary life skills. Education without such enabling features can get reduced to a ritual. If skill development is defined as vocational education and is separated from formal education, the later is only a means of cultural transmission and often cultural reproduction. Formal education, as the harbinger of mass education, has definitely heralded social transformations through widening its accessibility and affordability contravening the limited reach of the medieval elitist education. The achieved status of being educated is largely appreciated as mobility enabler in traditionally stratified societies like India. But the enhanced social status, if not corresponded with upward economic mobility, has limited implications. Whether education, in its present ‘adopted form and content’ can achieve the benevolent instrumental goals in India, has been apprehended by many sociologists. This paper critically analyses the prevailing form of formal education in India and depicts its insufficiency in addressing the problems related to human resource development. It suggests that vocationalisation of formal education, as practiced in many western industrial societies, can ensure social and economic development for the masses.

Keywords: right to education, skill development, vocationalisation, employment generation