BHUBANESWAR : Chairman of the National Board for Accreditation (NBA) Prof KK Aggarwal advised educational institutions to design courses for individual students to create opportunity for everyone and promote independent thinking.
Delivering the annual lecture at Siksha ‘O’ Anusandhan (SOA) here on Wednesday, he said the new National Education Policy (NEP) framed after 34 years, intends to achieve this and encourage the students to think while focusing on multi-disciplinary education.
“Over the years, we have taught students to write in their examination papers what they have studied in the textbook. If they strayed, it meant loss of marks. We have produced a lot of parrots, but no thinkers. In fact, we did not allow the students to think,” Prof Aggarwal said.
Over the last several decades, he said, the earlier education system has caused critical damage to the lives of young people as they never learnt to take risk in life. This trait in life must be encouraged but the system did not allow risk taking, he pointed out.
Lamenting that India has not produced a Nobel laureate since 1947, the NBA Chairman said a day would come when a student would make the choice as to how many subjects he/she would study in a course.
SOA Pro-Vice Chancellor Prof Pradipta Kumar Nanda presided over the programme. Later, Prof Aggarwal called on SOA founder president Prof Manojranjan Nayak and held discussions with him.