BANGALORE: “Silence is the most powerful enemy of justice. We have to dismantle the colonial classroom culture, where students are silent and submissive,” opined Dr B Seshadri, member, High Power Committee for Redressal of Regional Imbalances in Karnataka, on Thursday.
Speaking at a one-day seminar on ‘Value Based Education’ organised by World Academy of Science, Humanities, Education and Literature (WASHEL) and Vivekananda Yuva Chetana, he said, “Re-engineering is a management concept. Our higher education system needs fundamental rethinking and redesigning from the scratch. The monotonous monologue should be replaced by reciprocal learning in a classroom. Any social transformation has to start first from a classroom.”
Focussing mainly on teachers, Dr Seshadri urged them to speak out more openly on the issues that plague the society. Pointing out the challenges in higher education, former vice-chancellor of Defence Institute of Advanced Technology (Pune), Prof L M Patnaik said, “Everything is global now, which means competition is at a global level. Getting the right faculty is a problem in our system as we are not producing enough PhD holders.”
“Bodies such as UGC and AICTE have remained mere regulatory bodies that lack visionary thoughts which can produce quality PhDs,” he said.