ABSTRACT
The International Institute of Educational Planning at Paris co-sponsored by UNESCO has also experimented with a few graduate students spending their summer acquiring training by providing research assistance to staff and the honorary fellows of the Institute. The general position at both places appears to be that the best training that can be provided will be not through any extended courses of a formal variety but through research or actual work with planning organizations by individuals of intrinsically high calibre and good basic academic training_
Academic Training The enumeration of these matters raises the question whether techni-
cal (even vocational) training in specific skills is an adequate answer to the need for competent educational planners. It is argued, for instance, and with some force, that the best training in educational planning is a rich training in comparative education in all its aspects -economic, sociological and political-so that a capacity to see the educational system as a whole in its interaction with the rest of the social system and over a period of time is engendered. Some valued contributions to the pool of trained manpower for educational planning have, therefore, come from post-graduate and research training programmes in education, public administration, economics, and the
345 social sciences in the Western as well as the developing countries. An example of the kind of inter-disciplinary training which may develop is provided by the work done in the Centre for the Study of Education and Development at Harvard University's Graduate School of Education. This consists of giving additional training in fields relevant to the making of educational policies to persons who are fairly experienced in the field of education. Their programme is organized in such a way that they develop their existing specialized knowledge and also study subjects which they have not studied before. The arrangement is that they spend eighteen months to two years on this course work in Harvard, and then go out on an apprenticeship assignment o some planning operation or some Ministry of Education for at least a year, during which they acquire materials to write a thesis which is either a critical evaluation of work carried out in the field or a more academic discussion of some of the theoretical problems involved in planning. Attention is paid to some aspects relevant to educational planning during doctoral training at l'Institut d'Etude de Dt!veloppement Economique et Social in Paris, the Netherlands Institute of Economic Research and in some departments of Economics in Indian and other universities. The educational and social science aspects of educational planning receive attention in many doctoral programmes of the University of Berlin, the Comparative Education Center at Chicago University, the University of London Institute of Education, and Teachers' College, Columbia University, among others. The new International Institute at Columbia and the Research Unit in the Economics of Education at London, the developments in universities like Michigan, and Syracuse, are examples of extensive interaction between education and other social sciences in the study of planning. Institutions in the fields of economics and statistics, such as the UN Demographic Research and Training Centre at Bombay, the International Statistical Education Centre sponsored by UNESCO at Calcutta, among scores of similar institutions in developed as well as developing countries, have training programmes which contribute skills needed in educational planning. The systematic use of sociology (particularly micro-or the internal sociology of education i.e. sociology of the classroom, school, and school systems) appears, however, to have received less scholarly attention and less space in training programmes than may in the long run prove justified both from the viewpoint of designing instructional programmes in existing institutions of formal education and of determining the relative emphases of various educative institutions. This will presumably grow out of the academic organizations and actual planning experience of developing countries themselves.
