Gurcharan Das (Official Website)

BUILDING A SELF

Isaiah Berlin, the Oxford philosopher used to say, “Men do not live only by fighting evils. They live by positive goals.” This is good advice in these troubled times when our minds on the sub-continent are so obsessed with war that all other thoughts have been crowded out. No positive goal of Berlin’s, I believe, is more worthy of debate than the quality of the education that we are imparting to our young. Ever since the draft paper on the national education policy came out, the debate across the country has been hijacked by the secularists who rightly see subversive designs in the saffronisation of education. All attempts to give colour to education—whether saffron or Marxist—are bad, but the real problem is that in the process important issues relating the imparting of excellence and the intellectual development of the human personality have been lost. Continue reading…