Updated on: Saturday, October 24, 2009
Chennai: For the country to continue on the growth path, both quality and quantity are indispensable for Indian education.
This was message from the two-day National Summit on Quality organized by Confederation of Indian Industry, being held at Chennai.
Our demographic dividend would become a serious demographic disaster unless scaleability, inclusiveness and excellence are achieved, said Anand Sudarshan, Managing Director of Manipal Education.
K.N. Shenoy, the Chairman, CII Institute of Quality, which is organising the event stated that India can't think of becoming the next superpower, without proper handholding for the rural and other disadvantaged sections of society.
He noted that his Institute has been carrying out training programmes for headmasters, cluster school programmes and other quality improvement measures, especially in government schools, in order to achieve this goal.
M.V. Subbiah, the chairman of the National Skills Development Council and former chairman of the Murugappa Group, proposed a two-sided approach.
He considered that school education should go back to the traditional Gurukul format, which promotes holistic personality growth.
Higher education should follow the German vocational model, where a student specialises in the vocational field of his choice immediately after his schooling.
The two-day summit brought together educationists, NGOs and industrialists to showcase viable models to scale up quality education