From 50 Years Ago: Education in Kerala.

The controversy aroused by the Kerala Education Bill has spread far beyond the confines of the State. It naturally raises a doubt whether E M S was wise in departing from the convention of Cabinet Government of having only amateurs at the top in selecting Shri Joseph Mundassery as his Education Minister. For there is nothing really controversial in the Bill itself; it is the mover of the Bill who rouses controversy. Shri Mundassery is a distinguished educationist. For more than 25 years, he was a teacher in a private college in the State, and he was not just a teacher. An able speaker and a talented writer, he had rare courage which often brought him into clash with the management of the college and with his fellow litterateurs. Finally, he had to leave the college under unhappy circumstances. This background of his had naturally made some people ask, whether Mundassery would be able to take a dispassionate view of the teacher-management problem which has been brewing for quite a long time in Kerala as also in other States. This doubt in the public mind, Opposition has been trying to exploit. But for the Education Minister’s past, Opposition would not have succeeded in working up an agitation even before the text of the Bill had been published.

A study of the Bill which has now been referred to the Select Committee does not show anything particularly new or revolutionary or even tendentious. A reform of education in the State had been long overdue and the present Bill minus Mundassery and the Communist Party would have raised no storm. It would have been accepted as a matter of course, except by the vested interests which were intended to be hit. The principles enunciated in the Bill are already in operation, in one form or other. The Bill seeks to codify them and to give proper directives for action.