Convened by Director of IIM Kozhikode, the roundtable will meet again in October to discuss the values schools should promote

A national roundtable on ‘Re-thinking Indian Education’ was held at the India International Centre (IIC) in New Delhi, on August 2009. Country’s 20 leading educationists and policy makers came together at the event including Minister of HRD Kapil Sibal, principals of some of the most eminent schools in India, representatives from Canadian education and Indian students from the Harvard University among others.

At the roundtable, convened by Prof. Debashis Chatterjee, Director of IIM Kozhikode, it was felt that for shaping a great future for Indian education, the country needs a different kind of politics. Speakers said, “We need the kind of political leadership that will shield educational leaders from making decisions that are educationally unsound.”

“The roundtable was to promote free and uninhibited conversation on the future of education in India. As an educator I felt the need for re-thinking and re-imagining Indian education which requires radical transformational shifts if India were to succeed as a nation,” IIM Kozhikode Director said.

Sibal stressed the need for community schools and for revamping the CBSE education system with ten thousand schools under it. “We want to make teacher education more effective and would take steps toward upgrading the quality of teaching in schools,” the Minister said.

At the conference, questions were raised on Sibal’s earlier mention of collaboration between higher education institutes like IIMs and schools. To this, Sibal answered, “I said I would be happy to drive the quest for excellence in teaching and learning that an IIM represents. I have myself trained several thousand secondary school teachers and principals, and I know that there is a hunger for fresh ideas on how to drive excellence the school system.”

There is very little connection between secondary and tertiary education in India, Sibal said, and added, “They currently operate in their own silos. After class twelve most students are bewildered by what to choose from a plethora or options for higher education. There needs to be a more integrated approach to looking at how a student needs to be guided as far a progress from secondary to tertiary education is concerned.”

IIM Kozhikode will hold the next roundtable in October 2009 where speakers would delve on the values that schools should promote. “Until the next roundtable in October, we plan to disseminate the insights gathered in the first conference across the nation, so that there is a coherence and clarity in our collective understanding as to what education was all about,” IIM Kozhikode said.