Education is the process of bringing desirable change in the behaviour of human beings. It can also be defined as the process of imparting or acquiring knowledge through instruction or study. If education is to be effective, it should result in a change in knowledge, skill, attitude and understanding. Thus, in education, the greatest emphasis should be placed on the development and growth of a person, both physically and psychologically. The development and growth must be positive, and these must be manifested in his/her daily life.

As society develops, it becomes imperative that the cumulative experience and the knowledge necessary for political, economic, social and other development should be passed on to new generations, or to the people who need this knowledge. The accepted customs, norms, values, skills, which are required to be preserved, need to be passed on to the successive generations. And to do this, various methods and media of communication are required.

Types of Education

With the development of society, education has focused on various aspects, such as child education, adult education, technical education in arts and crafts, health education, physical education, and several others. The broad classification of education could be:

Formal Education

Nonformal Education, and 

Extension Education

Formal education

Formal education is an institutional activity, uniform and subject-oriented, full-time, sequential, hierarchically structured, leading to the award of certificates, degrees and diplomas. The schools, colleges and universities fall under this category.

Non-formal education

Non-formal education, is not formal, which means it is: flexible, life, environment and learner-oriented, diversified in content and method, non-authoritarian, built on learner-participation, helpful in mobilizing local resources, and an instrument/which enriches human and environmental potential.

Non-formal education processes and programmes should, in the long run, lead to:

creating awareness in individuals and society, of the prevailing environmental situations and the need for and direction of change,

cultivating a rational, objective and scientific temper,

enriching human potential and, thereby, increasing community resources, and promoting individual and group creativity,

increasing the functional relevance of learning, both to the learners and to the community,

achieving a greater degree of individual, social, cultural and economic development through democratic action and active participation,

building a learning environment in which every individual shall have equal opportunity for continuing self-learning, and

a better sharing of opportunities and social wealth and, particularly, a more equitable and

just distribution of knowledge among various sections of society.

Extension or organized face-to-face communication is kept within the scope of the DSC. The extension provides a form of DSC, which might be more effective than the mass media.

Extension education has proved very effective in Agriculture and has since then widely been practised all over the world, especially in third world countries.

It was thought that simple communication tools could be used to educate the farmers about various innovations. Once motivated, they would use the new hybrid seeds, fertilizers, machines etc. This happened and, as a result, the food production increased manifold in the last two or three decades.

Literacy Programme

The Farmers’ Functional Literacy Programme is the biggest on-going country-wide programme of adult education. It is, in reality, a complex non-formal education system at its initial stage. Its implementation is the responsibility of the Central Government, and the scheme is classified as a Central Sector Programme. There are many development schemes and projects in the country, the efficient implementation of which is hampered by the low level of educational attainments. This is particularly true of the enormous scheme of the High Yield Crop Varieties since the modernization of agricultural

practices have to be accompanied and supported by a programme of manpower development.

The Farmers’ Training and Functional Literacy, Programme, an inter-ministerial project implemented jointly by the Ministries of Agriculture, Education, and Information and Broadcasting, is an attempt to get a qualified answer to this fundamental challenge. The basic idea behind the project is that there is a direct correlation between the physical and human resources. In other words, this is an integrated approach to a comprehensive rural development programme, to the “Green Revolution”. The main goal of the scheme is to support and strengthen one of the basic national objectives: self-sufficiency in food, increase in crop production and growth of agricultural productivity.

The functional literacy component was not only viewed in correlation with other developmental objectives but, from the very beginning, was conceived as a method of training the fanners for development purposes, a comprehensive non-formal educational programme and an opening to continuing education.

Education and DSC

Communication for development purposes should be distinguished from communication for the sake of entertainment, such as chitrahar, or commercial advertising of soap and toothpaste or news dissemination news bulletins, The World This Week, etc. Entertainment-oriented communication also has a powerful social influence and the possible effect on the attempt to meet the national objectives. 

It was agreed that the development-support communication should be taken to embrace the following: the infrastructure (economic, technological, organisation administrative); the information processing and transfer systems; (c) the media the personnel, the communicators; the recipients; the supporting communication services; organized interpersonal

communication and extension services; the contents; the purposes or objectives (recognizing that they may vary, but that national development goal a usually central). It was recognized that the central focus was on mass communication and that a multi-media approach with inter-media comparisons was necessary.

Uses of Communication for Education

The case for uses of communication for education has been convincingly argued on the following grounds:

communication helps to enlarge mental horizons;

it can be used to raise levels of aspirations;

through communication, attention can be focussed on problems having a bearing on the

contemporary developmental and educational context;

it can be effectively employed to build consensus on the new economic and cultural goals;

through communication, experimentation can be encouraged and knowledge relating to their success and/or failure can be widely disseminated, and

it can also be utilized to teach specific skills and techniques.

To sum up, the DSC for education can play a powerful role in nation-building and development and can contribute significantly to bring about social change in the desired direction. 

(Reddy, D.Narnsimha; Sridhara, B.A.; Rao, B.S.S; Rahim, Abdur)