Some Wise Counsel

On Monday, President Ram Nath Kovind gave a practical piece of advice to the students of Dr YS Parmar University of Horticulture and Forestry at Nauni in Himachal Pradesh while addressing its ninth convocation. He said the goal of education should not be limited to simply getting a job as students can start their own enterprises by using their own skills and learning. He said since there is immense potential in the field of fruit and vegetable processing, with their knowledge and enterprise, graduates of the university can help consumers in the country and abroad get better food products and help farmers get better value for their produce. What is remarkable here is the emphasis on entrepreneurship with graduates from universities, armed with the required skills and application-oriented studies, not jostling in a precarious job market but evolving into employers themselves, thus causing a paradigmatic shift in the employment scenario. This is all the more important as the rate of unemployment keeps soaring and as the question mark on employability has become only too bigger by the day, thanks to the education system that has remained out of sync with modern imperatives and the rapidly mutating job market. What the universities across the country need to do is lay emphasis on applied learning as opposed to mere theoretical learning. This is crucial not just in the sciences domain but in the changed architecture of the humanities arena too, with a subject like political science, for instance, when it comes to electoral political science, becoming increasingly dependent on applied statistics, or, for that matter, stock markets that can be understood better via the route of a mathematical stream called game theory. With new developments and advances, our mindset must also get de-warped.