What is education? This is one of the most loosely answered questions and most of the time mixed with the term knowledge. We must understand that education is the ability of person to use the knowledge to judge a situation or condition. We can also say that knowledge is theoretical in nature but education is the practical form of knowledge, but knowledge alone cannot bring best out of the education it must be a proper blend of knowledge and values. Without values knowledge is like a free-floating ship that can reach anywhere and can also sink to the bottom of the ocean. It is the result of knowledge without values, that some of the people land up joining terrorist groups and many other organisations are involved in other anti-social activities.
Though Indian education system works in the direction to provide value education to our students but it has failed to check corruption, raise feeling of patriotism, respect for natural resources, accept differences in society, fractured family relations, rising intolerance among students and rising violence among students. The major reasons behind the failure of values education system are the increasing focus on academic performance of students, outdated curriculum and isolation of value education from main stream subjects. The present curriculum fails to deliver the present need of societies from value education, fake news, involvement of students in violent game and easy access of students to sexual content is a serious concern and must be addressed with regular updates in the curriculum. There is also need of important changes in the evaluation of value education instead of written answers the focus must be on practical and condition-based evaluation so that real time thinking and application of value education can be evaluated effectively.
National education policy 2020 address the above concerns and talks about designing the entire curriculum based on the Indian cultural values. The document further talks about integrating value education with all other subjects this will help in making value education part of daily life of students rather than treating values as a separate subject. The document also talks about creating a value based environment at school so that the students can learn feel the changes themselves that a value based environment can make on their learning, daily life attitude and development. The bigger role has to be played by the teachers because teachers are not only the knowledge provider but they are also the first ideal of a student specially in the primary section and this is the time when students learn habits and values that remains with them for life time, even a small practice of sharing the moment, achievement and emotion can help students to learn and deal with a variety of situations. At secondary level subjects like social science and languages can be used to promote the life values to the students, case studies from current scenarios can help students to learn leadership and problem-solving skills.
Indian culture and spiritual knowledge are totally based on the values. Vedas, Buddhism and Jainism prescribe certain practices that are essential for attaining the right knowledge, these conducts were so designed that even after thousand of years their relevance has not lost the importance. In the similar manner our students also need some values that are essential to gain the knowledge and use this knowledge for the development of society. India that is looking forward to lead the world must look back and adopt the best values that can guide the coming generations.