Let's make our world a better place

Updated on: Monday, August 31, 2009

What role should teachers exhibit to enhance and motivate the learning skills of a student?

For humanizing our education, we've to make a determined effort to change our teaching for the better. We cannot afford to remain smugly satisfied with our consistently vending the familiar again and again, year after year. It has been my experience, over the years, that when students are educated and motivated to think about their thinking, their learning skills improve significantly. We must inspire our students to further explore what they learn and discover through their studies, to talk about new ideas both inside and outside the lecture theaters and seminar halls.

Do you see any stigma attached to sustained human survival depleting?

We are living in a world desperately in need of strong and effective remedies for unrelenting and pervasive evils of oppression and injustice that humanity has suffered for centuries. As members of the global academic community, it is our responsibility to find ways of making our world a better place to live and work. This we can do by contributing towards the strengthening of a deliberative, dialogical and democratic culture for dealing with problems faced by all of us locally and globally.

How does the compulsive limitation of market forces affect quality of education?

The forces of economic globalization tempt us to view the world through the prism of the market and market alone. An eye for short-term gains and quick profits is a compulsive limitation of the market forces. Such and approach results only in the proliferation of unethical practices among the students and teachers. There is a wide spread tendency to pass the examination by cheating. It is high time that the University takes all the necessary steps to reaffirm and reassert its commitment to the values of rigorous, disciplined and objective scholarship and research which is released from the pressures and demands of private profit.

According to you, how can we sustain our environment aiming excellence and efficiency?

Our research must begin by questioning well established perspectives and frameworks, assumptions, norms, models and paradigms in order to become a real adventure of ideas. An understanding and acknowledgement of the tentativeness and incompleteness of received opinions and ideas, our conjectures and hypotheses, can help us in learning to be humble about our claims to truth, and becoming open and tolerant towards differences in views and opinions.

What is the method one needs to employ to churn out not only better professionals but also good human beings in the current trend?

In this regard, let me conclude by making a pledge ourselves to pursue the goals for which Mahatma Jyotiba Phule dedicated his life: to identify, understand and engage with the social ills and human suffering which our society had stopped questioning. Keeping this concern in view, let us work together to make our university a place where we can learn to think seriously and act efficiently against the exclusionary logic of communal, casteism, ethnic, regionalist, linguistic and gender divisions that are often invoked to tear apart the social fabric of India.

Timesofindia

Let's make our world a better place

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