'The basic aim of education is to make students inquisitive'

The first day of a two-day conference on ‘International Conference on Urban Transformations,

Youth Aspirations

and Education in India’ kick-started with a thought-provoking inaugural panel on education.
The panel has

Bhushan Patwardhan

, VC, University Grants Commission (UGC), New Delhi, and Chief Guest of the conference; Prof Pankaj Chandra, VC, Ahmedabad University; and Prof

Sudhir Jain

, Director,

IIT Gandhinagar

. Sharing his views on youth and education in India, Prof Bhushan Patwardhan, who spoke in his personal capacity as a teacher, said, “We have made a major divide between white-collar and blue-collar jobs and there is no reason why it should be. Rural youth come to urban areas mainly with an aspiration to get a stable job, but it is not their real aspiration. Real aspirations come out only when you talk to them, but we don’t even sense those aspirations in our current education system. The basic aim of education is to make students inquisitive, but we don’t allow them to think at all in the current system of education.”

He highlighted the two of the several initiatives taken by UGC – 1) National Academic Credit Bank, which will essentially allow students to open an account in this virtual knowledge bank of courses to start learning much earlier than entering a college. Students from anywhere in the world will be able to use this. Currently this idea is in the process of getting it regulated. 2) Semester Outreach Program, a structured credited program to allow students aspirations to flourish in education. It will be a kind of NCC 2.0 and NSS 2.0 to retrieve the original spirit of these programs and which will enable students to learn from the community, as learning doesn’t happen only in classrooms. It will let urban students go to rural areas and rural students go to urban areas, live there for one month, know their lifestyles. Students and their moral values will change automatically. “Networking within students is also very important. They can learn from each other and help each other. This semester course will give an opportunity to students to go out of their routine classrooms and do something that they like and aspire for. Classrooms must have multi-way learning experience rather than a one-way monologue from the teachers. We must cement the divide between the urban and the rural.”