The Presentation Session was headed by a Professional Educationist, Ms. Sangeet Krishnan, involving all the panelists in an interaction regarding the Revolution prevailing in the Education sector.
First on the panel, was an ex Interim CEO and ex Social Entrepreneur, Mr. Piyush Sehgal, whose thoughts were very clear on what Revolution can do internally in Education. He commenced the session with a quote by C. S. Lewis,” Education without values is as useful as it may seem, can create a clear and a more devil.”
As the session went on, he spoke about his connection with ISKON, one of the biggest platforms of Education with several schools across the world. He said,” I am connected with ISKON, and it started its first school in 1975 in Vrindavan, with a very unique vision of creating a school for selfless servants.
Moving ahead with the presentation, Mr. Saxena expressed his views on strengthening the Education system stating, “If we give 3/4th of our time on external Revolution, we should at least give 1/4th of our time on Internal Revolution. We are trying to connect the external and the internal together, because if one is missing, then the second one will have no meaning.”
Next on the panel was the Chief Operating Officer of Bharti Foundation, Ms. Mamta Saikia, who spoke about the Educators and their teaching process.
She addressed by saying, “As an educator, I have been in this industry for more than 35 years, and I think “Education without values has no meaning and therefore, life skill development, and personality development, all this has to be inbuilt and internalized into everything that we do in schools. And therefore, for the teaching training programs, I think rather than just the knowledge and the skills of the teachers, we have to begin the teacher training programs by addressing their attitudes.”
As a teacher or many years she shared her ideas and views saying “Very often when we have a teacher who connects to the heart of the child, learning happens despite the teacher. And we see those changes in an end number of schools in Bharti Foundation.
Ms. Saikia concluded with a message for all the Educators in this industry, “The root of the Education system is to transform the child to be a better human being. If that is kept in mind, everything else will fall in place.”
Moving ahead, our fourth panelist for the session was Mr. Akshay Saxena, Avanti Learning Centres, who considers his agenda to be slightly different from other Institutions.
He said,” We get to operate in larger towns and we are into blended learning classrooms. We gather young graduates from good colleges to run classrooms, and their ability in executing the task is due to the reason that we give them structured content and methodology and skilled training.”
Talking about his 6 years journey with Avanti Learning Centres, he said,” CSR has made a very interesting rule and I have seen that rule shift overtime. So, I think if we go back to 2010, most of our funding came from international donors. We were a new social enterprise and the idea was somewhat improves and at that point of time, there was not much appetite in Indian CSR to either back innovative and new ideas or for that matter invest heavily in system changing.
He further added, “But over the last 6 years, there have been two encouraging things where the government system became more open to people in helping them in partnerships. Secondly, CSR is matured in a country just being a very big push towards involved in system change.”
