CHENNAI: Bring powerful women to the fore, said Puducherry governor Kiran Bedi, while speaking on Women’s education in India at the ThinkEdu conclave. “Successful and powerful women should be brought to the fore, so that young children will notice them and aspire to be them,” Bedi said.
“These women are much more courageous than us because they have achieved their goals despite odds, despite not having as many opportunities as others. Despite not being as privileged as the rest of us,” she added.
While education for all is the primary goal, Bedi stressed on the need to also ensure that children cannot continue being revenue building models. “They have to be humanity building models,” she said.
Bedi played a documentary for the audience about schools with alternative education where in the place of exams, children have tests and instead of strict rules and norms they are encouraged to be kind and respectful to all. “In this digital age, technology has allowed us to achieve all kinds of things. Why can't we use this technology to reach far and wide and allow all children everywhere to access education and become self-reliant by self-educating.”
Bedi also said that children want to become teachers. “So, why do they have to wait till they become adults to become teachers? We all can become teachers no matter how young you are and also education doesn’t stop when we grow up as well,” she said.
Gautami Tadimalla, actress and activist, who was Bedi's fellow panelist also threw light on the importance of students being able to decide what they are learning and how they want to use that in our life, “Our responsibility is to allow access to students. Students are tired of traditional forms of education, we have to change the way education is imparted to children,” she explained. It always comes down to individual choice, she added.
When an audience member questioned the vast difference in women's access to education in the urban and rural areas, Gautami said that there was an ‘unforgivable and criminal gap between the urban and rural education’ and effort should be taken to get rid of this gap. “Education is every child's right, caste, sex or creed should be no bar,” said the actress.