1) SOCIAL CONSEQUENCE OF EDUCATION;
-This is the social impacts of education. If you take a traditional and relatively static society which is starting at a low level of economic development and inject modern education into it, this suddenly exposes a new generation to the 20th Century, well there parents may still be living a century or more earlier. This is bound to have all kinds of repercussions. We all have faith that on balance, it is a good thing to do but we are far from. clear about its full implications for the society concerned. We do know, for example, that it creates aspirations in young people that they would not otherwise have had, and it seems to accelerate the movement of bright young people from the rural areas to the cities. We also know that the more education people, the more they want, and this desire translates into the political; pressures for educational expansions. As far as a society as a whole is concerned, we know for example that any country which for many years has been a colony or dependency of another country but which has now acquired independence status, requires a long process of nation building before achieving nationhood in the full sense of that term.
2) EDUCATIONAL PRODUCTIVITY AND INNOVATION.
This concerns raising educational productivity and quality; in other words, how can educational planning help a nation to get maximum results, both in quantity and quality, from whatever educational resources it has available? It is useful in this connection to distinguish between the internal efficiency and productivity of an educational system, and its productivity seen from an external point of view. Internal productivity is measured by the relationship between the learning results achieved and the cost of achieving them- that is, the relation between ‘inputs’ and ‘outputs’. This relationship can be improved, up to a point, by relatively simple means involving no radical changes in conventional arrangement and practices, such as improving procurement or construction practices, maintaining equipment better, up-dating teaching materials, etc. major improvements in internal productivity, however, are likely to require more drastic changes and innovations, such as the introduction of radical new teaching methods and devices, such as new media, major changes in schedules permitting fuller utilization of facilities. A school system may be making relatively efficient and productive internal use of its resources in doing what it is now doing, but what it is now doing may not be especially relevant to the present and future needs of its society and on the individual students. In other words, it may be teaching the wrong things to the wrong people, in the wrong proportions. In this event, its external productivity is low, however high its internal efficiency may be. To state it differently, the ‘fitness’ of the system to its environment may be poor, because the environment has changed drastically and the educational system has not. This is in fact the situation with virtually all educational systems today; they need to become better adapted to the present and prospective priority needs of their society which have changed and grown enormously in the past 20 years. To improve both internal and external productivity and calls for far-reaching changes and innovations in virtually all aspects of educational systems everywhere.
3) TEACHER SUPPLY AND DEMAND.
- This is going to remain a crucial topic for educational planners but is likely to change its character somewhat. As secondary and university level educational output expands, schools should find it easier to recruit staff. If, for instance, some liberal arts graduates, over the next 3 or 4 years, find that there is no longer a job in administration automatically waiting for them, they will have to look at their other choices and up until now teaching has not been even their 2nd and 3rd choice. This means that schools can become more selective in employing teachers than during the earlier period of rush expansion. On the other hand there is an increase problem of upgrading the teachers already on the job who did not have an opportunity to go through secondary school or university. They will now need further education and training if the quality of the whole system is to be raised. Thus, in-service training will become more important. We still have much to learn about the most effective and efficient forms of in-service training. Another teacher supply problem which will probably become bigger in the next 10 years concerns specialized teachers. Particularly for technical and science education. The teacher requirement pattern will demand more teachers with not just a good general education or specialized in one of the traditional school subjects, but teachers who can teach in specialized programs, particularly in technical fields.
4) OUT-OF-SCHOOL TRAINING.
-Considerable progress has been made in developing methodologies for planning the formal school systems but little thought has yet been devoted to planning and co-coordinating these vital education and training activities that go on outside the formal system. This is an important frontier for educational planners everywhere.
5) TRAINING FOR BUSINESS AND GOVERNMENT.
-This concerns training for industry and commerce and for government service. This by and large, involves people outside the rural areas. Here is another key area in any educational system (including those of developed countries), where much re-thinking and research is needed to provide guides to future development that will make the best use of available educational resources. Here again we need to keep in mind not only the formal educational systems, such as the vocational high school, or the polytechnic (these have their place), but also out-of-school training for industry, commerce and government! In some cases, these are preferable to in-school training. They may be less expensive, quicker and may concentrate on people who really are going to practice the specialized training they have received. The great expense of technical training requires that we look very hard at the choice between formal and non-formal types of technical training when considering a country’s manpower needs.
6) RURAL AND AGRICULTURAL DEVELOPMENT
-Economists have now come to realize that unless a developing country puts heavy emphasis on developing its agricultural and its rural areas. It is not likely to able to make a takeoff into sustained industrial development. The reason is that industrial development needs a base of savings that can be ploughed into industry, and the major economic base in most developing countries is the rural areas. That is where the people and natural resources are. Agricultural development, in short, is a pre-requisite to industrial development. But in many countries agriculture has not been developing speedily enough. Priority has, understandably, been given to industrial development. But now more emphasis must be put on the rural areas. This challenges educationists to rethink the role of education in agricultural and rural development, and in doing so it is essential to visualize education not only in terms of the formal school- the elementary school, the agricultural high school, the agricultural college- but more broadly to include the many kinds of practical training and education that go on, or should go on, outside the formal system, such as farmer training, literacy training, training of mothers in home economics. All these kinds of training along with other actions aim at agricultural development, must be put together to raise living standards in rural areas.
7) THE POWER IMBALANCE.
-There are two sides of this;earlier, the side that receives main attention was the shortage of specialized man-power for economic development and government administration. Serious shortages of certain shortages of manpower still exist in most countries in and task of educational planners is to try to shape educational systems and the flow to overcome these shortages. Otherwise, economic growth and public services will be handicapped. The other side of the coin is that the overall number of new jobs is not growing rapidly enough in many countries to absorb the young people emerging from schools and universities. In recent years the imbalance has become a conspicuous problem. In a sense it is a good sign of educational progress, but it is also a source of grave concern to educators, political leaders and others, because the pupil who comes out of school with certificate or a diploma will not be satisfied to be told, “wait a while, the economy will absorb you one day, or if not you, then your children.” He wants a job right now and if he does not get one he may become a problem. It is not only a problem for the individual; it is a waste of human resources for his society. Educators and planners cannot simply dismiss it by saying it is someone else’s problem to solve. They cannot say? “We have produced the manpower, now you find the jobs.” Educational planners, while they cannot take responsibility for creating jobs, must be in a continuing dialogue with those concerned with economic development and employment. They must try to do what they can within the educational system to cut down the time line between living schools and finding gainful employment.
8) FINANCIAL CONSTRAINTS FACING EDUCATION.
-The great future problem is the inevitable financial constraints which educational development must face. In has always had to face them but the constraints in many countries are likely to be more severe simply because the proportion of national economic effort that is now going into education is so much larger than in the past that it is beginning to compete severely with other important demands such as health, housing and industry. One cannot expect the education proportion of total national budget to keep going up as rapidly as it has in the last 10 years in a good number of countries. This means that for one thing, that while educators and educational planners must continue fighting as they have always had to for bigger budgets to take care of more children and to do a better job of education. They must now learn more about physical affairs in order to seek out and obtain new sources of finance. But however successful they are at this, they will at the same time have to give much more attention to getting better and greater educational results out of the resources they already have.
9) RISING DEMAND FOR EDUCATION.
-The which will have to be faced whether in Latin America, Africa, the Middle East or Asia is the continued rapid growth of population combined with the rising demands by parents and their children for educational opportunity. There is no present prospect of this increase in population slowing down. Many developing countries, it should be noted, that have the basic natural resources to sustain a substantially larger population in the long run provided these resources are intelligently developed. The real problem is not total population, but the rate at which it is increasing in relation to the rate of economic and educational expansion. If population grows too fast, relative to everything else, it means lower real incomes and less food for each family and it means that education cannot expand rapidly enough. Its important to stress this because there is much misunderstanding in many newly independent countries over the issue of limiting population growth. This is sometimes interpreted as meaning that the former imperial powers are attempting to stop the growth of these people but the real issue is not this. It is one of balanced growth. The demand already, is likely to increase still further because education as way of generating its own demand. If you put a much larger number of children through primary school, you must anticipate that a few years hence, more pupils will want to go to secondary schools. In France for example, the question is not one of public demand for primary education because that is already universal. But since the war, there has been strong public pressure for more secondary education and as that demand is satisfied there emerges a greatly increased popular demand for University education. The gap between this popular demand and what a country can do at the moment in providing educational opportunities constitutes a major political problem in many countries.
10) GOVERNMENT POLICY
One of the most important constraints to successful educational planning is existing government policies. The government of the day has got a big say on which direction educational planning should take. Obviously the location of an educational institution is determined by political patronage, the planner has little or no say about the whole matter. Government support is very critical to successful educational plans. Reluctance of the government to implement plans makes them to remain paper plans.
11) INACCURATE POPULATION DATA
Planning is often done on the basis of a given population in a given level of education, however, more often than not, the population data in existence are wrong due to wrong estimations and shortage of skilled personnel in matter decennial census. It is difficult for educational planners to adequately forecast school enrollments by age and even sex in the given year. Consequently very difficult to estimate the number of classrooms, books, desks and teachers that will be needed by a given level of education it follows therefore that budget/expenditures for a given level of education are inaccurate.
12) TIME ELEMENT
Time lags between formulation and implementation of an educational plan. It is almost certain that time may elapse before the actual work begins.
johnson mwenjera answered the question on March 16, 2018 at 15:36