give us Knowledge not Degrees
When I returned to chennai, I did not have a house of my own as we had vacated the house 4 months back and my room-mate had shifted to another friends house. So since last few days have been staying with a different set of friends.
This gave me a chance to have a lengthy discussion with one of them. He had earlier shared his dream of starting a educational institute in Uttaranchal. Though we have had a discussion about this topic before staying together gave us the chance to discuss this in detail. So as usual I got into the mode of entreprenureship and shared the experience I have had in starting a company, the pitfalls to avoid and the key areas to work on before launching onself into this project. Manas, Pareekh - I shared with him the great Business Plan PPT of Amoke we had created for i2i - IIM- Cal Entreprenureship festivals. After haveing gained a experience on working on so many corporate presentations in the last 2 years, I was happily surprised to see that the content and the presentation of Amoke is fantastic. I can just tweak this to fit any kinds of situations.
Getting back to the topic - Why a need of a new institute?
2 days back one of my acquiantnce nearly summarized my thoughts on this - "give us Knowledge not Degrees" I say nearly because I think education should in addition also make a person mature enough to be able to "discover himself" and capable of answering the question - What should I do with my life ? Why is that we tend to have almost 16 years of formal education and at the end of it still incapable of answering this basic question. Why are we not taught a course titled - "FAQ's of life" ?
posted by Vishal Sah at 12/21/2005 12:00:00 AM
5 Comments:
So how do you measure/evaluate knowledge?
Same old way - Major & Minor exams at the end of each semester
The objective of educational institutions is not to answer what you should with your life. They assume that you have come to them after you know what you want to do.
I mean isn't it fair on the part of IITs to assume that you want to be a civil engineer if you take civil engineering?
I think what we lack today is a social infrastructure that encourages younglings to post this question to themselves. And we very seriously lack (as a society) the courage to accept the younglings' answer if it is not 'doctor/engineer/CA/MBA'.
For higher education your point is valid, but can the same be said for primary education. Yes IIT's can assume ppl want to become engineer, but the schooling must be able to egt people to think about whether they want to become engineer or not ?
I wonder if anyone ever tried to validate that assumption that "you have come to them after you know what you want to do."
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