INDIAN EDUCATION BY RADIO

Evening Star, Issue 21636, 3 February 1934, Page 4

INDIAN EDUCATION BY RADIO

The Government of the North-west Frontier Province of India (states n ‘ Times ’ correspondent), has decided to experiment with a wireless service for broadcasting selected programmes to the villagers of the province. For the present the scheme, will he confined to ten selected villages, but if the experiment is successful the Government hopes to introduce a network of transmitting stations that will serve the villagers throughout the province. The transmitting station will be at Peshawar, where alterations will be made in the existing wireless apparatus to enable the scheme to be carried out. The Post and Telegraphs Department maintains a powerful station at Peshawar equipped with both short-wave arid long-wave transmitting apparatus. Alterations to this equipment will elimi-nate-the cost of a special station, and the cost of , the project .is estiinated • at something over R 5.14,000,.14,000, which is being provided for in the Budget of lO.'il-So. A beginning will thus he made in the organisation of broadcasting as a means of educating the backward races of India. It may well lead to the opening of hundreds of local radio stations, whose programmes would claim the attention of village groups gathered around communal loud-speakers.

In India, China, Egypt, arid many smaller countries no sustained effort has been made in the past to educate the illiterate masses in their civic and social obligations. Even in Japan it is doubtinl whether the. duty of the citizens toward his country and his country toward the international community is really understood. The solution of the general educational problem of these people has for the most part been visuab ised as one of schools for the young, of abolishing illiteracy and bringing up a generation which has learned something of the wisdom of the West; but apart from uncertainty - as to the right kind of Western teaching for the young the expense of building and. maintaining schools.in every village—since education in Asia and Africa is a rural, not an urban, problem—is such that a century may pass before the whole ground is covered. _ ; Education by broadcasting is a powerful agency in white countries, but may be much more powerful among backward and illiterate races, dwelling in little villages or on scattered, farms, cut off by lack of communications from the free interchange of ideas, yet affected by the white and the indigenous trader, the missionary, and the villager who returns to his homo after prolonged contact with outside influences. The great handicap of such a rural population is not illiteracy, but isolation, an isolation which a school in itself does nothing to change. Successful pupils hasten to the towns, and those who fail to find urban employment remain as a discontented element in the countryside. A sound system of rural broadcasting would in the first place aid the school work of the young, bringing them into touch with able speakers on every subject, and it would dispel the dullness of village life, supplying entertainment, news, and general instruction to old and young alike. Women, too, would'enjoy peculiar benefit in those countries in which public opinion discourages the attendance of girls at school or of women at the meetings held by touring officers.

'-’’•tments of Government whose task it is to teach the villager—the agricultural expert, the health officer, the education inspector—would welcome such a means of spreading information, while the local magistrate and the police officer would contradict flying rumours "nd issue such notices as concerned the people at large. It seems unnecessary to argue the advantages of such a system in any pari f Asia or Africa, if it can be cheaply run. The vernacular languages will he used, since the general population is being addressed. The entertainment will be of a simple type: indigenous music, folk stories, and humorous dialogue, ’cstnictinn also will take a simple form : Short talks on seed, crops, and cattle, market prices, and weather reports; discussion of village sanitation, of malaria and other diseases ; notices of forthcoming events, fairs, and floods. Above all. a frank news-bulletin, as impartial as ' ' 'nan imperfection will permit, should serve as a corrective of idle rumour and inaccurate newspapers.