V
V.Balasubramani
Guest
Start Up India
India’s children are neither parrots nor monkeys – give them a break, a real one
It will help immensely if Start Up India is preceded by Wake Up India
During a recent interaction with the media, Finance Minister Arun Jaitley said the response to the Start Up India event in New Delhi was so massive, he thought the next time a stadium would be in order. In Davos, business people and bureaucrats who have rarely if ever risked anything were encouraging young India to take the risk of being part of the fourth industrial revolution, jobs for which do not exist yet but automation will be the centrepiece. At an event in New Delhi Sundar Pichai the CEO of Google said India’s education system should encourage children to take risks. It is okay to fail, he said – failure is what has made Silicon Valley what it is today.
Indians are good at telling stories of school and college dropouts as long as it is nowhere near them or theirs. In America, Steve Jobs was a drop out and Bill Gates quit Harvard goes the drift. To make sense of this gabfest, I did a quick search to see what lower kindergarten (LKG) applicants typically children between three and five are expected to know to make the cut. They are expected to count till 100, know the alphabets, both capital and small letters. They are expected to know shapes – square, circle, rectangle etc. Some LKG tests also expect general knowledge – who is the prime minister of India. It is okay if the child says Sachin Tendulkar – that cannot be grounds for worry, but it is. Children barely able to walk alone attend mind abacus classes. In a piquant post this week Soumya Rajendran wrote that sending children to the moon was easier than getting them into LKG. She is being kind – Mars is the new moon. Read her post here.
See more at: http://www.thenewsminute.com/articl...hem-break-real-one-38088#sthash.O0ERVTmt.dpuf
India’s children are neither parrots nor monkeys – give them a break, a real one
It will help immensely if Start Up India is preceded by Wake Up India
During a recent interaction with the media, Finance Minister Arun Jaitley said the response to the Start Up India event in New Delhi was so massive, he thought the next time a stadium would be in order. In Davos, business people and bureaucrats who have rarely if ever risked anything were encouraging young India to take the risk of being part of the fourth industrial revolution, jobs for which do not exist yet but automation will be the centrepiece. At an event in New Delhi Sundar Pichai the CEO of Google said India’s education system should encourage children to take risks. It is okay to fail, he said – failure is what has made Silicon Valley what it is today.
Indians are good at telling stories of school and college dropouts as long as it is nowhere near them or theirs. In America, Steve Jobs was a drop out and Bill Gates quit Harvard goes the drift. To make sense of this gabfest, I did a quick search to see what lower kindergarten (LKG) applicants typically children between three and five are expected to know to make the cut. They are expected to count till 100, know the alphabets, both capital and small letters. They are expected to know shapes – square, circle, rectangle etc. Some LKG tests also expect general knowledge – who is the prime minister of India. It is okay if the child says Sachin Tendulkar – that cannot be grounds for worry, but it is. Children barely able to walk alone attend mind abacus classes. In a piquant post this week Soumya Rajendran wrote that sending children to the moon was easier than getting them into LKG. She is being kind – Mars is the new moon. Read her post here.
See more at: http://www.thenewsminute.com/articl...hem-break-real-one-38088#sthash.O0ERVTmt.dpuf
