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Are cars weapons of mass destruction?

Ladakh-based educationist Sonam Wangchuk feels that our attitude to the environment will change with awareness, for which we must re-examine our approach to education.

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Sonam Wangchuk
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The need to re-examine the approach to education was discussed by leading conservationists and educationists during a panel discussion in Mumbai earlier this week. "We don't need no education. We don't need no thought control,” crooned moderator Ranjit Barthakur as he opened a discussion between Sonam Wangchuk, the Ladakh-based co-founder of the alternate school Students’ Educational and Cultural Movement of Ladakh (SECMOL), and Kartikeya Sarabhai, founder and director of Centre for Environment Education (CEE) at a south-Mumbai hotel on April 18.

Barthakur stressed that there is an urgent need to simplify and redefine issues of depletion and conservation because they are complex for students to grasp. “We have to make these subjects easy for them to understand,” he said. Doing this would involve re-examining the education system, said Wangchuk and Sarabhai, who both agreed that academics today have largely turned into indoctrination centres, driven by good grades.

As an example of what can be done, Sarabhai recalled the National Council for Science & Technology Communication's initiative, Science Express - Biodiversity Special' (SEBS), a 16-coach train that has been specially designed to mount an exhibition on biodiversity and climate change. The train travels across India to educate kids who might otherwise not have access to such an exhibition.

Wangchuk pointed out that schools must train students to focus on the problems that the world faces today, to undo the destruction caused, instead of focusing on values promoted by capitalism i.e. increasing production and consumption. “Twenty-first-century violence is not committed with guns and daggers. It is committed with neat looking cars that are weapons of mass destruction. They drop a kilogramme of carbondioxide every four kilometres you travel, and yet, are not considered as violence," he said at the event organised by the non-profit, Asia Society India Centre. “Children should not only excel at intellectual activities, but be capable of using their heart and hands to face real life situations.”

This philosophy is reflected in SECMOL, the school that Wangchuk co-founded in Leh in 1988. The student-run institution is a place where students who've fail in the conventional education system get a second chance. Following the principle of 'Bright head, skilled hands and kind heart,' the school has transformed many lives, including that of Stanzin Dorjal, who had failed in school four times and is now an award-winning filmmaker; Thinias Chorol, a social entrepreneur who also failed in school three times; Tsewang Rigzin, who failed in the 10th grade five times but went on to become the education minister for Ladakh.

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