The most dramatic phenomenon which occured after the last world war is the "revolution of rising expectations" which has been released in the hearts of millions of people living in more than fifty new nation-states. The response of the governments is equally dramatic and revolutionary--development planning to hasten the process of modernization. This revolution of rising expectations--the challenge, and development planning--the response, have so inspired the United Nations General Assembly that it declared the sixties the Development Decade.
So now it is safe to say that the issue is no longer: "Plan or no plan" but rather: "Who shall plan, for what purposes, in what conditions, and by what devices?" Hence, when one of the delegates of the 1963 Conference on the Application of Science and Technology for the Benefit of the Less Developed Areas remarked that "We are in the era today of plans," he merely expressed explicitly what everyone took for granted.
In its broadest terms, this study will be dealing with one aspect of development planning, but certainly the most crucial: human resources development. For, in the final analysis, the ultimate success of any plan for development may be attributed to the vision and capabilities of the people who have conceived it. Indeed, human resources development is at once a cause and an effect of economic development. Or, as expressed elsewhere: "Education...is both the seed and the flower of economic development."
Specifically, this study will be concerned with just one constituent element of human resources development in poor countries: education for community planning.