IMPORTANT POINTS
From and manner of providing value based education ought not to be ordained by the Court.
Matters of policy are entrusted to the Executive. Court is concerned with the preservation of the rule of law.
Whether children pursuing their education from classes I to XII should be saddled with a separate course of moral science, or whether a value based educational system would best be sub-served by including a separate subject on moral science or whether value based teaching should traverse the entire gamut of a prescribed curriculum are matters which cannot be determined under Article 32, Constitution of India.

JUDGMENT :

D.Y. Chandrachud, J.

1. The petitioner is an advocate-on-record practicing before this Court. Invoking the jurisdiction under Article 32 of the Constitution, the petitioner states that she is “deeply distressed with the rapidly degrading moral values in the society touching every aspect of life where making money, anyhow has become the sole motto of society”.

2. The grievance of the petitioner is that the present education system does not inculcate the true purpose of education, which is to produce a good human being. The State, in the submission of the petitioner, is under a constitutional obligation to endeavour to provide educational facilities which inculcate moral values in the course of primary and secondary education. It has been urged that the course curriculum prescribed by the Central Board of Secondary Education (“CBSE”) and the National Policy on Education do not recognise a sufficient status for “moral education”. In the submission of the petitioner, the failure to include moral science as a compulsory subject violates Article 25 of the Constitution which recognises the freedom of conscience and the fundamental right to profess, practice and propagate religion. This in the submission militates against the fundamental duties contained in Article 51A(f) of the Constitution. Impressed by the need to protect the moral fibre of the nation, the petitioner seeks a mandamus for the inclusion of moral science as a compulsory subject in the syllabus of school education from classes I to XII “in order to inculcate moral values and nurture national character in the national interest”.

3. The respondents to these proceedings are the Union of India through the Ministry of Human Resource Development and CBSE. In response to the notice issued by this Court on 2 February 2015, a counter affidavit has been filed by CBSE before this Court. The learned ASG states that the Union of India adopts the counter filed by CBSE.

4. The National Policy on Education of 1986, while examining the values of education states thus:

“8.4 The growing concern over the erosion of essential values and an increasing cynicism in society has brought to focus the need for readjustments in the curriculum in order to make education a forceful tool for the cultivation of social and moral values.

8.5 In our culturally plural society, education should foster universal and eternal values, oriented towards the unity and integration of our people. Such value education should help eliminate obscurantism, religious fanaticism, violence, superstition and fatalism.

8.6 Apart from this combative role, value education has a profound positive content, based on our heritage, national and universal goals and perceptions. It should lay primary emphasis on this aspect.”

Similarly, the National Curriculum Framework of 2005 emphasised that:

“We need to reaffirm our commitment to the concept of equality, within the landscape of cultural and socio-economic diversity from which children enter into the portals of the school. Individual aspirations in a competitive economy tend to reduce educating to being an instrument of material success. The perception, which places the individual in exclusively competitive relationships, puts unreasonable stress on children, and thus distorts values. It also makes learning from each other a matter of little consequence. Education must be able to promote values that foster peace, humaneness and tolerance in a multicultural society.”

5. The Framework emphasizes that in order to foster democracy as a way of life rather than only as a system of governance, the values enshrined in the Constitution assume paramount significance. The Framework takes specific note of the importance ascribed by the Constitution to the constitutional values of equality, justice, liberty and secularism.

6. CBSE has stated in its response that it has integrated these values of education across the curriculum to inculcate constitutional values and core universal human values w