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(Secretary Society for the Advancement of education)
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MESSAGE FROM DR.K.ROY
Through all our institutions the two great imperatives which are in a way axioms or guiding principles are that :
(A) Children should enjoy learning and
(B) That learning should be meaningful.
For children to enjoy learning it is necessary that teachers should enjoy their work -which is teaching-learning and all the concomitant
activities that go with it. This brings us to a significant difference in the light in which we see the teacher's role from the commonly
held one. When we speak of the teacher as a facilitator we are, in my opinion, trivializing the role of the teacher. The teacher is a
leader and a guide opening the doors of perception for the children as it were. The inspirational role of the teacher is crucial to the
transactions between the student and the teacher and cannot be ignored. It is the reason why children remember their teachers long after
they have left school. Our effort therefore is directed to removing this dichotomy and restoring to the teacher his or her rightful place.
For learning to be meaningful it is necessary that what children learn in the classroom should be related to their everyday lives and
the environment, natural and urban, geographical and political to their values and their attitudes. Too often we find their knowledge is
theoretical. Crack the modernist liberal veneer and we see beneath the neo-colonial model based on the British Indian mode we have been
schooled in.
Finally a word about values. Values cannot be taught as we all know but we talk as if they can. Values have to filter through the fine
print of the filigree of words and actions, tones and gestures.
In these times of changing values when patriotism may be an outmoded idea in the name of which innumerable atrocities have been perpetrated,
faith and confidence in oneself and in one's fellow men and pride and joy in work well done can never be outmoded. I hope we can revive this
spirit of purposeful labour and learning in us and in our children. Book learning will look after itself.
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