Handbook For Teachers of Basic Schools

Abstract

This Handbook is being published in belated fulfilment of a long delayed promise. The Central Advisory Board of Education had appointed a Committee on Curriculum in Basic Schools, which had recommended amongst other things, that the Ministry should bring out a Handbook of Suggestions for teachers of Basic schools. The project was readily taken up but it was found to be a very difficult undertaking. We adopted the obvious approach of contacting some of the most experienced persons in the field of Basic education and invited them to contribute different chapters for the proposed Handbook. It transpired that some of them were not prepared to do so, because of their various other pre-occupations as if, to a devoted and well informed worker in this field, anything could be of more vital interest than putting across the right ideas and techniques of the new system to the teachers of the country. Some promised but were not as good as their promise and reminders were treated With the respect they usually receive. There were yet others who did actually respond to me request, but it transpired that they could not put across their ideas with the vividness, the simplicity and the concreteness which are essential in a publication of this kind. Anyway, it was a path strewn with many disappointments but ultimately persistence seems to have triumphed and we have been able to secure the necessary material from a number of Basic educationists and others conversant with their Special subjects. I am thankful to them, as well as to Dr. Salamatullah the Teachers' Training Institute, Jamia Millia Islamia, Delhi, who undertook to edit the material and give it a certain coherence and unity which it might have otherwise lacked and to eliminate something of the Implication and overlapping which are often the necessary result of joint authorship.