Working With Our Hands- The Importance Of Vocational Education_37530

"What the country needs are a few labor-making inventions."~ Arnold Glasow My wife Girija and I recently visited the Olcott Memorial High School in Chennai. We were shown around by the director,hermes birkin, Ms. Lakshmi Suryanarayanan, a highly committed and energetic 60-year-young lady brimming with ideas on how to make the school better. We were especially impressed with the crafts section, where the students not only learnt crafts like tailoring, jewelry making, and screen, but also sold their products in the annual Theosophical Society exhibitions. Set up in 1894 by the President and Founder of the Theosophical Society, Col. H.S. Olcott, the school is committed to uplifting the lower castes by providing them free education and the dignity of the skilled working life. Lakshmi told us the students really enjoy these craft periods. They build skills for life, whether for personal or professional or both. It made me realize how it is unfortunate that our education system does not value craft disciplines and vocational courses at the same level as academic pursuits like science and math. Parents pressure their children to pursue degrees and jobs as the means to upward social mobility. Lakshmi told us about a student,hermes kelly bags, Dinesh (name changed), who was not academically inclined, but gifted in crafts. Lakshmi organized scholarships for the boy to pursue craft studies. However,hermes bags, his parents stepped in, and forced him to go through mainstream education. After a year of frustration, the boy dropped out of the academic track, and is now exploring options for getting back to a craft diploma. When the Honorable Minister for Education, Kapil Sibal, addressed the recent Conscious Capitalism conference, I asked him why pursuit of craft disciplines should not lead to a high school degree. His response was parental pressure - parents would view it as a dilution of the value of the high school degree. In an earlier post, I had talked about Dr. Kalbagh's successful experiment with vocational courses in Maharashtra - Vigyan Ashram. It is fortunate that the Maharashtra Board has adopted vocational training as a valid stream within SSC. Perhaps every board should. In a country like India, we know that employment opportunities in the organized sector are limited to less than 10% of the available work force. We know that people have natural talents that may extend beyond academics into arts, crafts, and other professions, or running small businesses - ways of earning a good living while enjoying what you do. However, the education system is oriented towards employability in the narrow domain of getting a job, rather than building capabilities and competencies that equip people to work on their own and excel at what they do. How do we bring back the dignity of labor, regardless of the path one chooses to labor in? How do we convince the parent community that an academic pursuit is just one of several options available to their children? And that they should encourage their children to follow their dreams rather than get stuck in mediocrity? How do we get our educational system and government to open up a plethora of possibilities to our youngsters - from traditional crafts and vocations to the new global business opportunities that the internet has thrown open? How do we get our children ready for success in the Connected Age? These are the questions that we're trying to get answers to. Do share your own thoughts and insights on promoting work oriented education.