Lt. Governor Tamilisai Soundararajan on Wednesday called upon school teachers to place more focus on imparting value-based education that would both sharpen the intellect and refine the mind of the children. Inaugurating various initiatives of the Sri Aurobindo Society (SAS) aimed at creating NEP-ready role model schools, Ms. Soundararajan pointed out that there was a convergence of views shared by both Sri Aurobindo and former President S. Radhakrishnan that education should be a combination of imparting knowledge and values. Pointing to the felicity with which children in the 0-8 age group assimilated multiple languages, Ms. Soundararjan said this phase of childhood should be utilised to encourage learning of other languages. “Picking up another language should not be seen as undermining one’s mother tongue”, she added. Emphasising her reverence for the teacher fraternity, she said it was teachers who had a bigger role than the parents in the proper upbringing of a child. Parents of this generation tend to get tensed up as they lack the time or the patience to address the needs of their child. It is the teachers who, in spite of having to manage family pressures of their own, step in to fill the parenting gap, Ms. Soundararajan said. The Lt. Governor advised teachers to attune themselves to the ways of the new generation of children, especially their tech-savvy nature. “The better the teacher understands the modern-day child, the more effective will the teaching be”, Ms. Soundararajan said.
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Among the priorities of the National Education Policy was the creation of digital classrooms, teaching innovation and promotion of local languages in instruction, she pointed out.
The Lt. Governor said measures were being taken to improve the state of school education in the Union Territory. She had already visited over 20 out of the targeted 75 schools as part of the Azadi Ka Amrit Mahotsav initiatives to get a gauge of shortcomings that need to be redressed.
P. T. Rudra Goud, Director of School Education, said the NEP ensivaged multi-disciplinary roles for teachers. He wanted the fraternity to be prepared to step into multi-disciplinary roles. Among the SAS initiatives to be launched at the event were two editions of handbooks — ‘Zero-Investment Innovations for Education Initiatives’ (ZIIEI), Auro Scholarships and “Project Inclusion”. The ZIIEI is part of SAS’s “Rupantar”, a national, multidimensional programme that has led to several large-scale innovative projects to empower teachers, gear up education officers, support students, increase parents’ and community’s participation, and technology enablement —all aimed at bringing about mass-scale improvement in the quality and reach of education. Pradeep Narang, SAS chairman and Simmi Mahajan of SAS also spoke. More than 100 selected teachers and around 10 education officers from Puducherry were felicitated at the event.