Summary of Talk to the Students of
on their Annual Day on Aug.25, 2000
Education in
the 21st century
has to be far more broad-based than what it was in the earlier
centuries. Particularly at the school
and pre-college level, the student should be motivated to study every subject
seriously. Usually students tend to think otherwise. A student who wants to go
to engineering thinks only of science subjects as important. He tends to be
indifferent to the social sciences and languages. A student who wants to go to
medical education
thinks only Biology is important and sometimes neglects
mathematics. Very often some parents also fall into this trap. This is the first advice I want to give
to all the students here.
You should be
interested in everything equally. If because of circumstances you are weak in a
subject you should take extra efforts to improve your performance in that
subject. I am telling this because of a fundamental educational need. It will be at least ten more years before you
go into the outside world as a full-fledged educated person. What is important then in the
outside world cannot be correctly
anticipated now. All such anticipations have gone wrong. In these days of very
rapid advance of science and technology it is almost impossible to make this
guess. In the forties and fifties the most popularly sought after programs were
civil engineering on the professional side and physics and chemistry on the
science side. In the fifties and sixties it was electrical engineering,
mechanical engineering on the professional side and mathematics on the science side. In the sixties
and seventies, because of the moon-landing and the breaking of the genetic code
it was robotics , mathematics and biology. In the
seventies and eighties it was electronics and telecommunications. In the
eighties and nineties it was computer science and computer engineering.,
In the nineties it was Management science. In the twenty-first century it is
perhaps going to be Genetic, Genetic engineering and Information Technology. Whatever it be you have to be prepared. Preparation does not
mean you have to study all of them.
So this is my second advice to you. Be
ready and willing to learn new things as you go into the outside world. Don't
think that they can teach you everything you my need to know. There is a
Sanskrit saying:
AchAryAt
pAdam Adatte pAdaM shishhyas-sva-medhayA /
pAdaM
sa-brahma-chAribhyaH pAdaM kAla-krameNa ca //
Meaning, Of all
the learning that a student gets, only a quarter of it comes from the teacher;
a quarter comes from his own intelligence; another quarter he acquires from his
contemporary students and the last quarter only in due course of time!
That is why you must always have a willingness
to learn new things. It is this open mind to learn new things that makes students successful
wherever they go.
The third point that I wanted
to emphasize today is
the fact that science and technology is
not the end of it. The purpose of education is to create knowledgeable citizens
of course but it is also to create useful citizens who will be human enough to
be useful to the rest of the society in a respectable way. In other words
education has to transform you into a cultured person. Science can only inform you; it cannot
transform the animal passions of man into human qualities like compassion,
sympathy and kindliness. For this we have to lean back on the age-old values
which have been handed down to us for more than 20 centuries. Great
people of the world like Socrates and Plato, Yajnavalkya and Sanatkumara, Vyasa
and Valmiki, Confucius and Lao-tse, Sankara, Ramanuja and Madhva have handed
down to us profound thoughts . You have to imbibe as much of that treasure as
possible. For this you have to keep reading.
When you read
you have to understand. After you understand you have to be convinced. After
you are convinced, you have to follow.
In order to do all this you have to have a very sharp intellect.
To understand and work in the world of science and technology, information
technology or genetic engineering also you have to have a sharp intellect. How
do we promote the sharpness of our intellect. By
constant use of the intellect we can do it. It should never be allowed to rust.
Also divine help can be sought. Indian tradition has the famous mantra of the gayatri imbedded in its culture. You all know it.
Copyright © V.
Krishnamurthy January 2007