Directions: Read the following passage carefully and answer the questions given below:
Philosophy of Education is a label applied to the study of the purpose, process, nature and ideals of education. It can be considered a branch of both philosophy and education. Education can be defined as the teaching and learning of specific skills, and the imparting of knowledge, judgment and wisdom, and is something broader than the societal institution of education we often speak of.
Many educationalists consider it a weak and woolly field, too far removed from the practical applications of the real world to be useful. But philosophers dating back to Plato and the Ancient Greeks have given the area much thought and emphasis, and there is little doubt that their work has helped shape the practice of education over the millennia.
Plato is the earliest important educational thinker, and education is an essential element in “The Republic” (his most important work on philosophy and political theory, written around 360 B.C.). In it, he advocates some rather extreme methods: removing children from their mothers’ care and raising them as wards of the and differentiating children suitable to the various castes, the highest receiving the most education, so that they could act as guardians of the city and care for the less able. He believed that education should be holistic, including facts, skills, physical discipline, music and art. Plato believed that talent and intelligence is not distributed genetically and thus is not found in children born to all classes, although his proposed system of selective public education for an educated minority of the population does not really follow a democratic model.
Aristotle considered human nature, habit and reason to be equally important forces to be cultivated in education, the ultimate aim of which should be to produce good and virtuous citizens. He proposed that teachers lead their students systematically, and that repetition be used as a key tool to develop good habits, unlike Socrates’ emphasis on questioning his listeners to bring out their own ideas. He emphasized the balancing of the theoretical and practical aspects of subjects taught, among which he explicitly mentions reading, writing, mathematics, music, physical education, literature, history, and a wide range of sciences, as well as play, which he also considered important.
During the Medieval period, the idea of Perennialism was first formulated by St. Thomas Aquinas in his work “De Magistro”. Perennialism holds that one should teach those things deemed to be of everlasting importance to all people everywhere, namely principles and reasoning, not just facts (which are apt to change over time), and that one should teach first about people, not machines or techniques. It was originally religious in nature, and it was only much later that a theory of secular perennialism developed.
During the Renaissance, the French skeptic Michel de Montaigne (1533-1592) was one of the first to critically look at education. Unusually for his time, Montaigne was willing to question the conventional wisdom of the period, calling into question the whole edifice of the educational system, and the implicit university-educated philosophers were necessarily wiser than uneducated farm workers, for example.

Read the passage and answer the questions :
Comprehension
The rivers of India play an important role in the lives of the Indians. They provide potable water, cheap transportation, electricity, and the livelihood for a large number of people all over the country. This easily explains why nearly all the major cities of India are located by the banks of rivers. The rivers also have an important role in Hindu Religion and are considered holy by all Hindus in the country.
Seven major rivers along with their numerous tributaries make up the river system of India. The largest basin system of the rivers pours their waters into the Bay of Bengal; however, some of the rivers whose courses take them through the western part of the country and towards the east of the state of Himachal Pradesh empty into the Arabian Sea. Parts of Ladakh, northern parts of the Aravalli range and the arid parts of the Thar Desert have inland drainage.
All major rivers of India originate from one of the following main watersheds :

1. Aravalli range
2. Himalaya and Karakoram ranges
3. Sahyadri or Western Ghats in western India
4. Vindhya and Satpura ranges

Himalayan glaciers in the Indian subcontinent are broadly divided into the three river basins, namely the Indus, Ganga and Brahmaputra. The Indus basin has the largest number of glaciers (3500), whereas the Ganga and Brahmaputra basins contain about 1000 and 660 glaciers, respectively. Ganga is the largest river system in India. However these rivers are just three among many. Other examples are Narmada, Tapi, and Godavari.

Read the passage carefully and answer the questions given below – The choice we make on a daily basis – wearing a seatbelt, lifting heavy objects correctly or purposely staying out of any dangerous situation – can either ensure our safety or bring about potentially harmful circumstances. You and i need to make a decision that we are going to get our lives in order. Exercising self-control, self-discipline and establishing boundaries and borders in our lives are some of the most important things we can do. A life without discipline is one that’s filled with carelessness. We can think it’s kind of live life on the edge. We like the image of “Yeah! that’s me! Living on the edge! Woo-hoo!” It’s become a popular way to look at life. But if you see, even highways have lines, which provide margins for our safety while we’re driving. If we go over one side, we’ll go into the ditch. If we cross over the line in the middle, we could get killed. And we like those lines because they help to keep us safe. Sometimes we don’t even realize how lines help to keep us safe.

Read the following paragraph carefully and answer the following questions
Every individual wants peace of mind. But it is hard to find a person who can say that he has attained such a state of mental equilibrium as will allow him to live a life of tranquillity. Peace of mind is a distant dream for all of us. What is the reason for this? The reason is that people hanker after ideal peace, that is, pure peace-a peace that is free from all kinds of non-peace items.
But this kind of absolute peace is not in nature’s storehouse. Let us take the analogy of the rose. A rose is a very beautiful flower, but every stem has its thorns. Indeed, thorns are an integral part of the rose plant. A poet has rightly said that thorns serve as security guards for the flower. The translation of his Urdu lines is “The safety of the flower would become impossible if the thorns were silk-like.” So flower have to be accompanied by thorns. There must be hard thorns along with soft flowers-that is, there must be non-peace items along with peaceful items. A peaceful mind is a very precious aspect of human nature and it too needs safety to maintain its sublime quality.

page no.(6/16)

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