If you do not skill India, you will kill India. - Sadhguru on Educated but Unskilled Childrens.

Actor Siddharth in conversation with Sadhguru on The Educated but Unskilled Childrens Future

Siddharth: I hope to have a revelation when I visit. But where do you see the next sea change or the next quantum leap or the next revelation that is required to take education in India, especially primary education, to a level that is more respectable and representative for the kind of country that we are?

Sadhguru: If we want to educate 1.2 billion people, our idea of education has to change. Over 50% of the population are below 30 years of age. Youth means humanity in the making. A country full of youth means a nation in the making. If you do not skill India, you will kill India. Skilling India needs to happen urgently; not over the next hundred years, but in the next five to ten years.

Now, we pass laws without knowing the reality of the nation. Just one example – there are many, many others too. We have a “Right to Education Bill,” which says child labor is banned; everyone goes to school from first to eighth standard.

The reality is different. When they come to ninth standard, at least 60% of them cannot even write a full sentence in the local language like Tamil or Telugu; I’m not even talking about English. They cannot add up five plus four. At about 14 or 15 years of age, the only thing they got to do is wear pants unlike their father’s. They never went to the farm, nor did they learn carpentry or blacksmithing or whatever else their father’s profession is. At age 15, they have no education; they have no physical body to go back to the farm.

We are producing millions of youth like this across the country, who have no skill, but they have the attitude of the educated. They are looking for a white-collar job, but they don’t have the skills. Even out of those who passed twelfth standard, even after graduation, many are completely unemployable because we are trying to educate a mass of 1.2 billion people with the measly infrastructure that we have. Why can we not look at this? When a five-year-old boy went to the farm with his father, it was not child labor alone; it was education. This is the way skills were transferred. Or if the father was a carpenter, the boy hung around his father’s carpentry shop and learned carpentry. By the time he was 15, he had a skill.

What has happened now is, you destroyed the traditional system and you didn’t establish a modern system to compensate for that. We are producing millions of youth without any skill. The way many of them even pass exams is, the teacher is reading the answers and the students are writing them down. That way, it doesn’t take much to get 35 or 40. A very meager kind of education.

Siddharth: How to change this systemic problem of unnecessary higher education and lack of primary education?

Sadhguru: One billion people is a big number for any nation. You are not going to change the quality, the skill level, the sophistication, and other things overnight. We must have the patience to do that. These laws are passed according to Western values – “No child labor.” When a father took his son to the farm, he didn’t treat him as a laborer. He wanted him to learn everything, to become a master of what he is doing, so that the son will do better than him.

This was the aspiration; this was education. In the education process, the boy also worked, which is not a wrong thing.

Now we think all the farmers have to go to Agricultural University. Are there enough universities for all of them? Can they leave farming for three years and become great farmers after they get their degree? We have no practical sense about what is needed. What we need is skills, not only education. In any society, only 15–20% of the people are actually suitable for academic pursuit. Others need skills to earn a living. The nation will throb with economic prosperity only when there are skills. Today in India, you can find a nuclear scientist, but you cannot find a carpenter, because the traditional skill transfer has been destroyed.

The idea of doing things in a more organized way is perfectly fine. But just making an idea into a law without knowing how to execute it is not going to work. I’m not saying it’s a wrong idea – it’s a good idea gone bad. For a good idea to work, you must give it legs so that it can walk. Now it is up there; everyone is aspiring for it; no one can touch it. With the present infrastructure of education, even in another 25 to 30 years, we are still not going to educate the whole mass.

It’s very important that some barefoot teachers are left loose who will go to the villages. Half a day, you teach the child about farming; another half a day, he works with his father. That way, you will produce good farmers. Bring in some scientific knowledge about farming; improve the implements that are available – all this can be brought forth. But instead, you just send him to school; till ninth standard, every day, he’s a truant, escaping not school but home, farm, and work; just going and sitting in the school, not learning anything. All he gets to do is he wears pants; he feels superior to his father. He has the attitude of the educated without any education. This needs to change. What are you going to do with a billion people with degrees? You need people who know how to work the land; you need people who know how to work with things and material.

Source : Forest Flower - August 2013 Issue.

Isha Samskriti Childrens: Doing Everything Right

A Donor's and Teachers’ initiative led to mid-day meals at Isha Vidhya

A large section of Isha Vidhya students belong to the weaker sections of rural society. Their parents are daily wage earners who leave home early for the day’s work. So they mainly cook only in the night. A portion of this is also kept aside as next day’s breakfast and packed as lunch for the children too.

In many of our schools, teachers noticed that the lunch brought in by many students got spoilt by the lunch break. Given the hot climate of Tamil Nadu where all the Isha Vidhya Schools are located, the teachers figured that the meal cooked the day before could not survive the heat and thus got spoilt by lunch time next day.

They also noticed that quite a few students especially those from financially weak background, brought lunches which consisted mostly of rice mixed with a gravy and just a green chilly or a pickle as side dish. There were no vegetables or proteins and therefore bereft of nutrition.

They brought it to the notice of school management as they knew that this insufficient nutrition was the main cause of malnutrition among the students. During the annual health checkups held in all schoola, doctors diagnosed that about 70% of Isha Vidhya students were suffering from anemia or malnutrition. This was of great concern to all as it is a well known fact that malnourishment in young children causes slow development of brain and body. Malnourishment also depresses grasping, retaining and analyzing abilities of young children.

It became clear that nutritious meals cooked in the school would be the only solution. It was also clear that the same would have to be subsidized heavily to make it affordable to the targeted students. While the school management was trying to find funding resources for both, one of our long standing volunteers from UK, who had come to know about it, contacted us. Deeply moved by the plight of these children, he found a donor who was willing to sponsor construction and equipping of a kitchen in each of the seven Isha Vidhya schools and another donor who subsidized more than 50% of the meals for the first year. The Donor for the kitchens, had just one condition. He wanted the kitchens to be completed and become operational by the start of the new academic session which was less than 2 months away. Our team was so charged by the donor’s generosity and keenness to help that they rose to the challenge and completed all the seven kitchens although with a slight delay of 15 days.

Each noon-meal is a well balanced one consisting of proteins, carbohydrates, minerals and micronutrients. 75% of the cost is subsidized by the school which in turn is supported by donors. Till last year, cost to children was Rs 4 per meal, which had to be increased to Rs 5 this year to meet the increasing cost of raw material and salaries to kitchen staff. For many children, this is perhaps the only good meal that they have in the day.

And thus mid-day meals started in Isha Vidhya.

(Appeal: You can sponsor noon meals for Isha Vidhya children for Rs. 3000 per child per year. Or you could sponsor the food for all children in one school for Rs. 10000/ day in any school of your choice on any day or occasion of your choice. Our schools are located in the districts of Coimbatore, Erode, Salem, Nagarcoil, Tuticorin, Cuddalore and Villupuram. Please write in to us at donations@ishavidhya.org)

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Isha Vidhya