vision
Honouring Life,
I
Loynpo Thakur S Powdyel Minister of Education, Bhutan
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had often thought - this was it! The light was retreating. Learning was rapidly becoming an irksome afterthought. I have often wondered why everything else takes the centre-stage but the very source of light should be consigned to the back-stage! It still worries me that almost everything else makes news but the noble sector only becomes relevant when something goes wrong in the society. I have often wondered what might have been the state of our world if Education had received its due. As a soft pillow beneath my aching head comes the first ever Global Education Summit. It should have happened a thousand years ago! But ‘the flag flies still and the city has not fallen’! Here, I have found a ray of hope. We can still redeem the sector noble and launch a new civilization. I would like to offer my deepest tributes to the enlightened minds that saw the reason for this event whose time has truly come. I commend the initiative taken by the Indira Gandhi National Open University, the Centre for Science, Development and Media Studies, and Elets Technomedia Pvt. Ltd. to host this historic Summit. It is a blessing to the world. Its value and its symbolism speak for themselves. Education may not be as newsworthy as the stock market or sports or tsunami. It may be less dramatic than HIV/AIDS or bush-fire or earthquake. But given its due and pursued with honour, the light of learning can redeem the world. I am deeply heartened that the Summit creates a precious space for the meeting of minds and sharing of dreams dedicated to making our world a better place for our children and our children’s children and beyond. Education is at the crossroads of a complex kind today. The attitude to learning and the outlook of the learner often call into question the viability of the whole educational mission. With the rapid ‘mercantilization of knowledge’ and commercialization of learning, the core function of the noble sector is coming to be governed by the laws of corporations and the employment market.
vision
Light and Learning… Change of vocabulary says it all: Are your graduates marketable? Are they employable? Are they saleable? How much further away could we be from the call to build faith and character, to learn the skills of usefulness and to cultivate the virtue of gracefulness that should define an educated person? Scholars have become commodities! The essentially normative architecture of education is being rapidly dislodged by the linear logic of economic efficiency with the result that if a lifeaffirming discipline is at the same time economically not viable, there are not only fewer takers, but its support and succor may be compromised. However, mundane and mercenary a course may be, if it has a material carrot dangling at the end, it does magic! One may wonder, therefore, what, after all, is the purpose
At a time when most of our social, spiritual, emotional and psychological moorings are giving way under the onslaught of mechanistic forces, there is an urgent need to rediscover and reassert the core function of education that combines the need to sharpen brains and skills with the need to build faith and character. When we occupy the most precious segment of our societies – its children and youth – in our seats of learning, for extended periods of time, it falls upon us – their guides and guardians – to give them a vision of the future in which they have a role to play. They will be our leaders tomorrow. If a nation has a dream, it falls primarily upon its education system to uphold it and to advance it. As for my country, the philosophy of Gross National Happiness is our North Star. This de-
If a nation has a dream, it falls primarily upon its education system to uphold it and to advance it
of education? Why do we occupy young people for nine months out of twelve in schools, colleges, and universities if the goal is nothing more than simply getting a job, as important as it is? The Global Education Summit may do well to look back and to look ahead for a more entire view of the human person and of the society of human beings – supposed to be the most highly evolved of all the animals on land, sea and the sky. It is about time to ask what kind of society do we envision? What dreams do we have of the future? Who will build that future? What do we owe our children? If we have a vision of the society ten years from now or fifty or a hundred years from today, we will do our part to progress towards that future one step at a time.
velopment goal is founded on the belief that the ultimate goal of all human beings is the attainment of happiness; that the profound needs of human beings are not necessarily physical or material; and that there is no direct relationship between the level of material wealth and the experience of happiness. Beginning in the academic session 2010, therefore, the Ministry of Education has launched a nationwide programme called Educating for Gross National Happiness to be realized through building green schools for green Bhutan. By hitching our efforts to a sublime goal, we believe that the noble sector will be able to discover its true purpose and perhaps redeem itself. Green schools are conceived of in the belief that education must address the multiple dimensions of a learner’s life.
The elements of a green school include, but are not necessarily limited to, natural or environmental greenery, intellectual greenery, academic greenery, social greenery, cultural greenery, spiritual greenery, aesthetic greenery, and moral greenery. The hope is that our children and youth exposed to these learning experiences will imbibe the right values and acquire the right kind of knowledge to make them better actualized and more fulfilled human beings. Once they complete their education and join the bigger society, they will release the positive energy and goodwill that they acquire at school to the society. A society that benefits from such inputs is expected to be more at peace with itself as well as with the world beyond. This is an experiment. We have no illusions about the challenges such a project presents. And we have our immediate concerns and compulsions as indeed the rest of the world has. We have the obligation to enroll the last child in the last hamlet, meet the Millennium Development Goals, fulfill the promise of Education for All. And all these against heavy odds! But we believe this is the right way to go, however difficult. Education must be taken to the next higher level of engagement than merely being a mercenary pursuit of degrees and diplomas unrelieved by light and learning. Therefore, what the world needs today is a new ethic of learning, a fresh outlook on knowledge. What we truly need is a new civilization – an educational civilization, if you will. No nation succeeds if education fails, but education succeeding, no nation will fail. The equation cannot be more compelling. We have a great opportunity to redeem education and make it a redeemer of the world! Let us do what we can when we can… History will judge what we make of this opportunity. digitalLEARNING / July 2011
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