The Hindu : Tamil Nadu / Coimbatore News : `Education's mission is to improve quality of life'

Online edition of India's National Newspaper
Sunday, May 02, 2004

Tamil Nadu

Tamil Nadu - Coimbatore

`Education's mission is to improve quality of life'

By Our Staff Reporter

COIMBATORE, MAY 1. Graduates should learn from the society in which they lived, without letting their academic knowledge alienate them from other people, the Vice Chairman, University Grants Commission (UGC), V. N. Rajasekharan Pillai, said here on Friday.

In his graduation day address at the Sri Ramakrishna Engineering College, Prof. Pillai said that the ultimate purpose of education was to improve the quality of life. "A degree is only the beginning, not the culmination of education. Your aim should be education for life, education through life, and education throughout life," he said.

"What you have learnt is only the text of education. This has to be applied to life only after understanding the context of society from the point of view of tradition, culture and societal underpinnings. Much of the information you learn in college, and many of the skills you acquired there, might not be applicable in a different place, at a different time," he observed.

Students should keep in mind the Tamil proverb: "What you have learnt is only a handful. What you have not learnt is as large as the world." It reiterated ancient wisdom that only a person with humility could acquire real knowledge. The creation of knowledge and the acquisition of skills, besides the storage, retrieval and utilisation of knowledge were the main purposes of education.

"You should keep in mind that you are the chosen few from among millions of your brothers and sisters. Of those in the age group 16 to 22, only seven per cent get the benefits of higher education. In India, higher education is accessible to only 0.5 per cent of the total population, or one in every 200 people. Technical education is available to only one out of every 2,000 people," he noted.

In a developing society, educated people felt secure physically, emotionally and psychologically. Modern society gave rise to tension between global and local concerns, tradition and modernity, materialism and spirituality.

However, there was need for consensus between global and local concerns, besides the realisation that the materialistic and the spiritualistic sides of life were two sides of the same coin. Only those who were spiritually strong could prosper materialistically.

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