Outline the implications of educational planning.

The problems just outline how vast implications for educational planning. How can we go about strengthening educational planning to cope with them? We know that we cannot overnight achieve the comprehensive, long-range, integrated educational planning which would be ideal. In fact, no nation has yet reached this idea. While we must keep the idea in view, we must be practical in pursuing it and not expect the impossible overnight. The first need is for more information to help us apprise the present situation.

Thus educational planning must include administrative planning and management analysis. This is no easy matter. It is easy to tell a country what is wrong with its present administration and organization, but far harder to improve the situation. Here again we need to learn more. Clearly a high priority must be given to improving the administrative aspects of the overall educational planning process, and research and training directed towards this end. Another implication concerns the goals and priorities of planning. Often these goals are defined in only the vaguest terms, sufficient for public addresses but not for practical planning. If planning is to be meaningful, it must begin with a clarification of educational goals in sufficiently specific, operational terms to provide a social basis for defining practical programs of action and also for evaluating progress.

Then there is the question of priorities. There are many goals and clearly they cannot all be realized at once. Often the tendency is to have a kind of democracy among goals which treats them all equally; with the result that little progress is made towards anyone of them. The very essence of planning is to make choices among alternative ways of using scarce resources, and aim can be to attain all the goals, but meanwhile its essential to determine a logical and feasible sequence for getting there. Without priorities and a time schedule, planning can have little meaning or justification. The final implication is that satisfactory solutions to all the foregoing problems will require a heavy emphasis on imaginative new results, improvements of analytical techniques and the flow of data, vastly greater emphasis on experimentation and innovation, and greater attention to evaluation. To sum up, educational planners everywhere face a series of major problem in the coming decades, most of which have been considered briefly above. While one central problem is to continue the trend of quantitative expansion which has been marked in the past decade, this is by no means the only problem. The most important and difficult problems lie in the realm of changing educational systems, to fit them more realistically and productively to the changing needs of societies and individuals, and to raise their efficiency and productivity so that they can contribute the most to national development within the limited resources available. If educational planning is to cope effectively with this unprecedented challenge, it will require the increased help of all the social sciences. It will require greatly strengthened research and training. And not least of all it will require a rich and extensive interchange of experiences and knowledge among nations, so that it can benefit from- and contribute to- the progress of all others.

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Kavungya answered the question on April 3, 2019 at 05:49