‘Education is the key to a just society’

If you want to build an ethical society, you need to create an educational system that will help facilitate it and also tackle poverty. This was the sentiment propagated at the seminar organised by the American India Foundation (AIF) and the Indo-American Chambers of Commerce (IACC) on leadership and ethics, on Friday.

Anurag Behar, vice-chancellor of Azim Premji University, who was one of the panellists at the discussion, said that educational system in a country would help build the values of an ideal society.

“Even 150 years ago, we did not have anything called a school education system. Today, we have built a system but it is up to us as to how we use it at the end of the day. We need to build an ethical and just society and education can bring about that change,” he said.

For Madhu Kishwar, senior fellow, Centre for the Study of Developing Societies, who also spoke at the event, the ethical challenge lay in the fact that there is widespread poverty in the country.

“There is a wrong notion that poor can’t fend for themselves. In India, the poor are not drug addicts or unemployed. Many are gainfully employed and in many cases are farmers, artisans, weavers and goldsmiths. While the people who sell their goods are rich and the ones who buy them are also rich, the ones making the products are not. This has to be addressed by the government,” she elaborated.