SOLVED PAPER 2024 (CDS) (I) (English)

Passage-1

Our tragedy today is a general and universal physical fear so long sustained by now that we can even bear it. There are no longer problems of the spirit. There is only the question: When will I be blown up? Because of this, the young man or woman writing today has forgotten the problems of the human heart in conflict with itself which alone can make good writing because only that is worth writing about, worth the agony and the sweat.

He must learn them again. He must teach himself that the basest of all things is to be afraid; and, teaching himself that, forget it forever, leaving no roon in his workshop for anything but the old verities and truths of the heart, the old universal truths lacking which any story is ephemeral and doomed-love and honour, pity and pride, compassion and sacrifice.

Until he does so, he labours under a curse. He writes not of love but of lust, of defeats in which nobody loses anything of value, of victories without hope and worst of all, without pity or compassion. His griefs grieve on no universal bones, leaving no scars. He writes not of the heart but of the glands.

Until he relearns these things, he will write as though he stood among and watched the end of man. I decline to accept the end of man. It is easy enough to say that man is immortal simply because he will endure that when the last dingdong of doom has clanged and faded from the last worthless rock hanging tide less in the last red and dying evening, that even then there will still be one more sound that of his puny inexhaustible voice, still talking.

I refuse to accept this. I believe man will not merely endure he will prevail. He is immortal, not because he alone among creatures has an inexhaustible voice but because he has a soul, a spirit capable of compassion and sacrifice.

The tragedy of our times is -

Passage-2

People do not understand the nature or ramifications of most educational changes. They become involved in change voluntarily or involuntarily and in either case experience ambivalence about its meanings, form and consequences. I have implied that there are a number of things at stake-changes in goals, skills, philosophy or beliefs, behaviour, etc.

Subjectively these different aspects are experienced in a diffuse, incoherent manner. Change often is not conceived of as being multidimensional. Objectively, it is possible to clarify the meaning of an educational change by identifying and describing its separate dimensions. Ignorance of these dimensions explains a number of interesting phenomena in the field of educational changes for example, why some people accept an innovation they do not understand; why some aspects of a change are implemented and others not; why strategies for change neglect certain essential components.

The concept of objective reality is tricky. Reality is always defined by individuals and groups. But individuals and groups interact to produce social phenomena (Constitutions, Laws, Policies, Educational Change Programmes), which exist outside any given individual. There is also the danger that the objective reality is only the reflection of the producers of change and thus simply a glorified version of their subjective conceptions. We can reduce this problem by following the practice of posing double questions:

'What is the existing conception of reality on a given issue?" Followed quickly by 'says who?"

People do not understand the nature or ramifications of educational change because