Academics want education revitalised

Indira, the advisor and former dean of IIM-A and founder president of Flame University set the agenda for the conclave, and spoke on the topic ‘The Road Not Taken’ or ‘Not: Enabling Future Generations to Make Choices’.

She said that children who are currently pursuing education are the eighth generation since the days of independence. The present batch of students are living in a world of globalisation and technology and are not even aware of what the previous generations had to undergo and the sacrifices they had to make to attain freedom, she said. According to her, the present generation of students are living with limited education in a cocooned life.

Stating that India was an ancient civilisation, Indira said that during her interaction with students, she often noticed that they were sharing only negative things about India. “Due to 500 years of amnesia, our entire dignity and self-respect is wiped out. Most of the research is happening at British archives and libraries so people are hardly looking at our own resources and archival material,” she said.

She pointed out that even for educational institutions in India that held world ranks, maximum points were given based on how many international students and faculty they had on their rolls.

The second lecture on ‘Managing Diversities: Issues and Perspectives’ delivered by AF Mathew, associate professor, IIM, Kozhikode, detailed the discrimination against women in all walks of life.

They were subject to abuse and violence all over the world and even in work spaces, they were discriminated against, not getting a remuneration on a par with men for the same amount of work. He said that it was important for teachers of students besides the management, to teach male students about to not be impartial with fellow women.

It should not begin at the college level, but in the school level, Mathew said, adding that people cannot become good teachers until they stop discriminating against women, as well as the poor, marginalised and disabled members of the society.

In his address on ‘How machine intelligence is shaping our future human contexts’, Manjunath Nanjaiah, founder and CEO, SwarmverseBigData Solutions Private Limited said “Education had, for some reason, made obedience as a virtue, while in reality it only communicated to the receiver that it was a command and control system, which worked well with machines and not very well with humans.”