the speaking tree - Art Of Parenting To Bridge The Generation Gap

Swami Parthasarathy





Parents have a difficult time relating to their children. They bitterly complain about `their independent and impertinent behaviour'. That they have gone out of control and stopped relating to them. Almost all parents point their finger at the young and see no fault of their own. Little do they realise that the problem of relationship invariably emanates from parents, from their clinging attachment and possessiveness towards the children.In the absence of the intellect the constant emotional pressures exerted by them virtually strangulate the young.The first step to straighten relations is for the parents to realise their inherent weakness and make a careful study of the psychological traits of their children.
Children are born with the capacity to absorb knowledge from the external world. It is called udana in Sanskrit, the power of grasping fresh knowledge which is optimum at birth. It diminishes with age. And when a person reaches old age it practically disappears. That explains why youngsters absorb ideas and ideologies, trends and fashions faster while the elderly take much longer to do so. The disparity in time for such absorption is being called as a generation gap. Hence the older generation perceive the world differently from the young. This disparity leads to argument and altercation, confrontation and conflict between parents and their children. If only either one understands that the other helplessly manifests his own nature then there would be greater tolerance, understanding and harmony . But the problem people face everywhere is the lack of such understanding on both sides which has strained or practically destroyed parent-child relationship stroyed parent-child relationship.Boundless Energy Children possess extraordinary energy whereas the elderly do not. They are prone to becoming tired and they try to combat it with stimulants, weekend breaks and vacations. The reason for this contrast is the absence of worry and anxiety in children, while adults are plagued with worries of the past and anxieties for the future.
In their desperation to exercise control over the children's tireless activ ities parents suffocate them with incessant restrictions.
The solution lies not in stifling them but in studying their nat ural tendencies and giving di rection to their energy . Hence adults need knowledge of high er values of life and practise them. By living those values and educating the children, parents can help children's energies flow in the right direction instead of stifling them. This procedure is very similar to preventing road accidents. There are two ways of avoiding accidents. One way, which is no way, is to reduce the speed limit of vehicles to a ridiculously low level. The other, sensible way, is to provide drivers with proper road sense by educating them with traffic rules and regulations. So too, youngsters should be provided with value education rather than being showered with dos and don'ts.
The general trend in the world is that parents fail to set examples of right living but merely pester their children with ill-founded advices. To set the relationship right they will have to live the life they wish their young to follow and avoid giving them sermons. US President Abraham Lincoln had put this idea across succinctly . He said: “There is just one way to bring up a child in the way he should go and that is to travel that way yourself.“
Therefore it is incumbent upon parents to set the standards through right examples for their children to follow.Only then can there be less conflict and there is a good possibility of bridging the so-called generation gap.
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Celebrating World Youth Skills Day 2015

India, where half of its population is below 30 years of age, are poised with the potential to become the next generation leaders, workers, thinkers etc. To embark the beginning of new India, Prime Minister Narendra Modi who in June 2014 had pledged to make country a Skill India is now seems to take shape after one year of rigorous planning and hard work.

Recognising the country’s young demographic dividend, Prime Minister has stressed on producing skilled manpower and pushing ahead the Skill India mission, the government is launching number of initiatives aimed at developing skills and promoting youth in every field. The Prime Minister will unveil new National Policy for Skill Development Mission and Entrepreneurship 2015 on 15 July to mark the occasion of World Youth Skills Day.  He will also roll out all-India flagship scheme, Pradhan Mantri Kaushal Vikas Yojana (PMKVY).

The government has set the target to skill 40.2 crore people by 2022 under the National Policy for Skill Development. The other initiatives to be launched are the model skill loan scheme, skill card for persons certified under Pradhan Mantri Kaushal Vikas Yojana.

Below are the opinions of what the stakeholders feel about the Skill India Mission and the initiatives that they are taking to skill youth of India-

Rajiv Pratap Rudy, Minister of State Ministry for Skill Development and Entrepreneurship (Independent Charge) & Parliamentary Affairs said, “Skills and knowledge are the driving forces of economic growth and social development for any country. We are in cognizance of the huge demographic dividend that our country stands to reap, at this point in time.”

Captain Sandeep Malhotra, Director, Alliance Educare and Research Private Limited says, “At the outset, we all acknowledge that institutions follow very fine academic practices for imparting regular curriculum. However, the country’s employment data shows that 82 per cent students face employment crisis due to the gap between their acquired knowledge and the industry needs. As we know, India is a nation with 65 per cent population below 35 years. It poses a tough challenge of skill training of 500 million people by 2022. However, if achieved, it offers a great opportunity of being a large pool of skilled workforce available to us and, to the world.”

Dilip Chenoy, Managing Director and CEO of the National Skill Development Corporation (NSDC), “NSDC is partnering with the state governments to introduce training partners and set up labs and get people skill trained. Two very recent examples are in Haryana and Himachal Pradesh where school children who passed out of 12th and not wanting to continue higher education have got jobs upto Rs. 50,000 a month based on their skill certificate. In many cases where they have not even passed 12th but passed their skill certificate, they have got jobs in the market, say for example in the retail sector, where they are earning an average of `12,000- `13,000 per month.”

Madan Mohan Mittal, Technical Education Minister, Government of Punjab, “Education, creation and adaptation of information, knowledge, skills and values are a key lever of sustainable development. The vision of “Skill India”, “Skill youth” will give equitable opportunities to all to access effective and relevant learning throughout life delivered through multiple formal, non-formal and informal settings. Skill education is important to individuals’ development as it is to the development of the nation and to the world at large.

In India Skill Development is very significant as the Hon’ble Prime Minister of India, Narendra Modi is the brand Ambassador for carrying this Skill Development in the whole country and he is taking keen interest. More so, inspite of his busy schedule, the Prime Minister has kindly consented to launch National Skill Development Mission and for promotion of Pradhan Mantri Kaushal Vikas Yojana which is being celebrated as World Youth Skills Day on July 15 at New Delhi.”

- See more at: http://digitallearning.eletsonline.com/2015/07/celebrating-world-youth-skills-day-2015/#sthash.jVoq5Vyw.dpuf

Only a 10th of disabled quota filled, OBCs way short of 

central job quota 

At a time when the country is celebrating Ira Singhal’s achievement in topping UPSC, the fact remains that disabled candidates occupy only a 10th of the central government posts reserved for them. The reservation is 3 per cent for the disabled category but only 0.3 per cent (9,339 out of 29.59 lakh) of the present central government workforce belong to that category, according to an RTI reply to The Indian Express from the Department of Personnel and Training.

The DoPT said in its response dated June 30, 2015, that the data is for 71 departments of the Union government. The government has 91 departments, including the President and Vice President’s secretariats, but DoPT did not specify which departments are absent from the information provided. The data does not include contractual staff and consultants because they do not come under the purview of reservation.

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In terms of community reservation, too, the SCs, STs and OBCs are short of their quota in central government jobs. The shortfall is actually only among the OBCs, who represent 17.7 per cent of the workforce against a quota of 27 per cent, implying that roughly a third of their quota has been filled by non-OBCs. The SCs and the STs, in fact, either exceed or match their quota.

The actual representation of the three groups adds up to 43 per cent (SC 17.6, ST 7.7 and OBC 17.7) when the quota for them is 49.5 per cent (SC 15, ST 7.5 and OBC 27). This implies that 6.5 per cent of occupied government posts, or 13 per cent of the reserved 49.5 per cent, have been occupied by employees of the general category when these should have been reserved.

Of the total central government strength of 29.59 lakh, 5.19 lakh belong to SCs, 2.28 lakh to STs and 5.24 lakh from OBCs. The remaining 16.87 lakh account for 57 per cent when the balance for the general category works out to 50.5 per cent.

For the gap in representation of OBC employees, a possible reason is that reservation for OBCs started only in 1994 based on the Mandal Commission report. Again, the representation of disabled employees is poor evidently because reservation for them was introduced only in 2004. The highest representation of the disabled is among Group-B employees, with 1.6 per cent belonging to that category. In all other employee groups, they count for less than 1 per cent.

The SCs, STs and OBCs have their highest representation among safai karmacharis followed by Group-C excluding safai karmacharis. The OBCs’ representation is slightly higher in Group-C (other than safai karmacharis) in comparison to SCs but in Groups-A, B and C (safai karmacharis) the OBC proportion is lower than that of SCs.

Among Group-A officers, general category employees have the highest representation (69.3 per cent). In Group-B, too, 67.4 per cent officers belong to the general category. Among safai karmacharis, the general category count falls below 50.5 per cent to 43.4, mainly because of the high SC count.

- See more at: http://indianexpress.com/article/india/india-others/only-a-10th-of-disabled-quota-filled-obcs-way-short-of-central-job-quota/#sthash.6lHgu8rq.dpuf

The Speaking Tree - Free of Past and Future

JANINA GOMES





Living in the present is the only way to live. It is in the present moment that we touch base with our inner selves and come to terms with outside reality . The now is a continuum from the irretrievable past to the embodied future.In life, we continually say goodbyes to our past situations and circumstances and our reactions to them. At the same time, in the now, we plan and perfect a future that we want to ensure for ourselves. The now is present in all that we enjoy and each moment expands our inner consciousness.
As the day progresses, we encounter both good and bad. We choose in each moment to strengthen the good in us and to weaken the low, so that the now acts as a bridge from one good experience to another.
When we choose to live our lives by dwelling in the past and with our attention riveted on a future that has not yet arrived, forgetting the present, we lose the precious now that is in the moment. Experience the richness of the present moment where there is flow of existence. We learn to live from moment to moment. Nature knows no past or future, except in our human consciousness.
If we remain in the now, we are open to enjoying all that is given to us as gift during the day . The now will never let you down, because you are responding to it from your own inner being, which gives pattern and harmony to the now.

Time to have a national exam body: Krishna Kumar

Making an informed career choice is not easy in our overheated system. It has no room for flexibility, says Dr Krishna Kumar.

Dr. Krishna Kumar, professor of education, University of Delhi, and former director of NCERT, speaks about the central issues affecting higher education in India.

Should our education system be reformed so that Class XII students can make informed decisions about their future?

Of course, the examination system needs improvement and change. The reforms initiated after the approval of National Curriculum Framework, 2005, included changes in the pattern of examination. CBSE and some of the State boards introduced certain changes. The outcome of these efforts will take time to manifest. Sustaining this kind of effort is necessary, but it seldom happens. Look at CBSE. It is burdened with a wide variety of entrance and eligibility tests. It was set up to look after secondary education as its name suggests. Now saddled with so much else, how will it find the time and institutional energy to concentrate on secondary education? The 1986 policy had promised a National Examination Organization. The idea was accepted in principle, but never taken forward.

India does need such a body if it wants to avoid Vyapams in future. How much burden can you put on CBSE? Its internal academic strength is very limited. State boards are in far worse condition. Under these circumstances, I am not surprised that examination reforms have lost some of the momentum built up a few years ago.

Has our education system been able to facilitate an environment to arouse student curiosity?

Making an informed choice is not easy in our overheated system. It has no room for flexibility. On the other side, students come with no idea, let alone passion, for an area of study. Many are driven by their parents or peers to make a choice. Arousal of curiosity is the heart of teaching. In our case, the child’s natural curiosity is mutilated during nursery and primary years. Then, in later years of childhood, some teachers try to rekindle it.

As you can imagine, this effort meets with limited success. Secondary schools and colleges usually focus on subject knowledge rather than on the student’s growth. Teachers are under pressure to complete the syllabus, so they overlook the student’s own interest and growth.

Delhi University cut-offs year after year are a letdown for students. Can you offer advice to students at this juncture?

The general advice I can offer to students is to realise that they also contribute to an institution’s reputation. Even bad institutions have good students.

The craze for reputed institutions is a cultural phenomenon. In fact, some of the most reputed institutions are doing very poorly, if you look at them individually. As for the procedure of fixing cut-offs for admission, it is a crude method of selecting students.

It goes against the basic point made by nearly every major commission on education; namely, that the results of school-leaving exam should not be used as a basis for enrollment in college.

Have our universities been able to update their courses so as to reflect changing times?

Our higher education system is facing the consequences of sustained institutional decay. Also, there is a systemic imbalance because the reforms initiated in school education, and its expansion, have not been matched at higher levels of education. It is not merely a question of updating courses or making them more relevant. The quality of any course, its structure and syllabus, depends on how carefully it has been designed and whether its design has taken into account the student’s mind and life. In our case, course designers seldom take into account the student’s life. Even a basic calculation of hours left for self-study is not made. Those who make a syllabus often treat it like a mail box. Everyone throws in a few suggestions, making the course unwieldy and incoherent. The semester system has added to the hurry to complete the syllabus. Traditional exams are not compatible with the semester system, but we have yoked them together. Also, the semester system needs a rich, efficient library system. Our libraries have been allowed to decay.

To what extent will Choice Based Credit System actually ensure a truly interdisciplinary system?

Young people enrolling for undergraduate studies should not act like innocent babies. If they recognize the crisis that the system is facing, their own experience of learning will be enriched. The crisis can give them an opportunity to develop deeper points of engagement with knowledge and society. The so-called choice based credit system is a borrowed innovation. It will exacerbate the crisis. The idea of a centralized curriculum will add to the culture of uniformity that already dominates most State-level universities and colleges. I hardly need to remind your readers that creativity and innovation are incompatible with uniformity and centralization.

How do you assess the quality of social sciences in universities?

Teaching of social sciences and humanities has indeed taken a beating in recent decades. These areas of knowledge provide contemplative capacities and spaces to society. Neglect of social sciences takes a toll on all reflective institutions, including legislative bodies, courts, the media, and universities themselves. Policy-making bodies and major universities ought to have led the struggle to protect the teaching of social sciences, but they did not. Now the larger crisis of higher education has engulfed this area.

I am referring to the crisis caused by hollowing out the faculty strength and cutting down support staff. Governments, both at the Centre and in States, have gone too far in these respects. They have damaged the system much too deeply to leave room for early recovery. They are now talking about filling up vacancies. That is good, but the procedure they have now adopted makes the chances of good selection bleak. UGC has invented academic performance indicators as criteria of selection. This method makes a travesty of academic work. Dr. V. Sujatha of JNU has rightly argued that these scores are inappropriate for the social sciences.

IITs are facing a faculty crunch... Do we need a flexible environment that makes it easy for teachers to join an institution?

When you say that there is a faculty crunch or shortage, you create the impression as if there are no candidates for teaching. This is not true. Institutions have created the present situation by neglecting and postponing appointments for much too long. No one can say for certain how this happened. Institutions got hollowed out. A vast gap now separates the permanent from the contractual faculty.

As for flexibility, of course, private institutions seem to be in a better position to exercise flexibility in certain areas. The public universities are being forced to function under unprecedented conditions. You can hardly make a fair comparison between a handful of private universities and the common reality of public universities. Also, you can’t isolate the question of quality from the larger ethos that an institution provides to its students. The Yash Pal committee on renovation and rejuvenation of higher education has pointed out the scale of our problems. It has also indicated several solutions.

Could you comment on the quality of natural and pure science courses in India?

Teaching of science, and its applications in professional areas like medicine and engineering, occurs within a shell. It does not enable young minds to develop imagination and the passion to hypothesize.

The curriculum and pedagogy of science ought to create what Prof. Yash Pal (who led the complex and vast exercise of formulating the National Curriculum Framework, 2005) called 'a taste for understanding'. Such a taste calls for freedom to work together, across boundaries of different kinds.

Many of our institutions end up presenting science as a procedural ritual. Science blossoms when institutions practice and demonstrate the freedom to think and imagine, and when they engage with the world around them. You can't inculcate a scientific temper in isolation from the world, with its living problems and contradictions.

Take, for instance, the problems of environment. They arise out of contradictions between development goals and technological choices. You need a lot of intellectual freedom to ask the questions that might promise insightful discoveries and connections that we need to make for easing environmental problems.

Far from providing such freedom, we seem to be driven by technological determinism.

Keywords: national exam body, Krishna Kumar, NCERT, University of Delhi, education system, Choice Based Credit System, career choice

Reality check on air quality

Delhi’s poor air quality has rightly made it the centre of media and government attention. However, the Indian government’s own air quality monitoring apparatus now shows the focus so far may have remained too narrowly on some pollutants and, as a result, only on some cities. India’s Air Quality Index, launched by Prime Minister Narendra Modi in early April, presents an AQI value for a given city based on the prominent pollutant in that city, calibrated for comparison. Six months of AQI values for 11 Indian cities show that Kanpur, Varanasi and Chennai have worse air quality than Delhi, on average. While Delhi and the rest of north India have higher particulate matter levels, cities such as Chennai find high concentrations of other toxic pollutants including sulphur dioxide and nitrogen dioxide. Dust, caused by a wide range of natural and man-made activities, can have a deeply damaging impact on the respiratory tract. But at the levels at which they are being experienced, gaseous pollutants have equally detrimental effects. The value of the AQI, one of the experts said, is in it being comparable across cities and across pollutants in terms of health impact. Some cities have been complacent over their low particulate matter levels. However, the new numbers show there is no room for complacency; other pollutants have been poisoning people.

The government has taken a great first step in setting up a national Index and in making data for 11 cities, for now, public. Data for more cities and monitoring stations need to be brought online. The next step should be for policy-makers to actually look at this data; the government’s own website is clearly showing that a number of Indian cities are experiencing what should be health emergencies on a daily basis, going by their AQI levels. Local governments must clamp down on the specific pollutants that are pushing their respective cities into the danger zone, whether it means moving polluting industries outside city limits or curbing the number of private vehicles by making available better public transport systems. They must also make it a habit to monitor pollution levels more closely. The Union government, meanwhile, must come out with an action plan for ‘severe’, ‘very poor’ and ‘poor’ air quality days; in Beijing, for instance, government vehicles are pulled off the roads, factories forced to limit production, schools shut down and citizens told to stay indoors on days when air pollution rises to an orange or red alert level. India needs similar clear instructions on what parents, teachers and commuters should do on poor air quality days. Else, all that they will be able to do is look at the index and worry for their health.

Keywords: India, Air Quality Index, Air pollution in India

India top recipient of US economic aid in 66 years

Chidanand Rajghatta

Washington





India has been identified as the largest recipient of US economic assistance over a 66-year period in inflation-adjusted dollars although Washington's pet allies, Israel and Pakistan, received far more American dole in per capita terms.Data compiled by USAID and released recently shows that India received $65.1 billion in economic assistance from the US in inflation-adjusted dollars in the period 1946-2012, closely followed by Israel, which received $65 billion. But considering Israel's population is less than 10 million compared to India's 1.2 billion-plus, the Jewish state has received 100 times more aid per capita than India.
US assistance to India currently is only around $100 million after New Delhi embarked on a course of weaning itself away from aid to trade in the 1990s. The difference between India and US client states such as Israel, Pakistan, Egypt, South Korea and others becomes all the more stark when one examines the American military assistance negligible in the case of India -to these countries.
In addition to the $65.1 billion in economic aid, Israel received a staggering $134 billion in military support during the same period to enable its survival. Pakistan, which received $ 44.4 billion in economic aid for a population one-sixth of India's, also got with $12.9 billion in military assistance from the US through regular channels, not counting the billions it bilked more recently in the form of coalition support funds.
In contrast, India received a modest $897 million in military assistance (mostly in the aftermath of the India-China war in 1962) placing it 47 out of a list of 193 countries that have received US military aid.More recently , India has been purchasing billions of dollars worth of US military equipment and technology .
For the full report, log on to http:www.timesofindia.com