An interesting thought that crosses my mind is that with all these fountainheads of learning at one's disposal, where does education result in real learning?
There is an old saying that it takes five women to see a man successfully through life – most of us have our grandmother, mother, sister, wife and daughter to thank for what we become but in my case, I also have five educational institutions that shaped my thinking and learning over forty years. School at Bishop Westcott, Ranchi, Mechanical Engineering at the Birla Institute of Technology and then Industrial Engineering at NITIE Mumbai, Advanced Management at the Harvard Business School and finally a PhD at IIT Bombay – quite a total but truly beneficial!
An interesting thought that crosses my mind is that with all these fountainheads of learning at one’s disposal, where does education result in real learning? The modern generation could well argue that their learning comes more from what they pull down from the internet rather than what is pushed at them by their teachers but each and every one will have favourite moments from the education years that have shaped our thinking and made us better human beings.
In my own case, I can think of many deep learnings that have shaped the way I think and react to day-to-day incidents and occurrences. At Westcott, it was my Vice Principal Fitzi who advised me to focus on English language and literature, which, he said, would serve me well in anything I chose to do. To this day, communicating – with customers, shareholders, colleagues and society has been my biggest strength. In college in the seventies during the complex environment in Bihar at the time of the Jayprakash Narayan movement, with classes being derailed very often, our institute Director H C Pande with, his iron sense of discipline, made us imbibe the values of restraint and focus on our own agenda, in spite of the disturbances around us. The camaraderie I experienced with both faculty and students in my post graduate years in NITIE and the outstanding case discussions at the Harvard Business School would surely have made me learn the value of team work and reflection on the experiences across cultures and finally the PhD process at IIT instilled the sense of humility and the respect for diverse approaches and viewpoints that are so essential for success in both academic research and leading business in today’s complex world! Let me call out Professors Rajen Mehrotra of NITIE, David Garvin and Mike Tushman of HBS and Anand Patwardhan and Deepak Phatak of IIT – all academicians extraordinaire but with the sagacity and experience that made is easy to relate theory with practice and look beyond the obvious, for the nuggets of learning that make every education process worth while.
At Westcott, it was my Vice Principal Fitzi who advised me to focus on English. To this day, communicating with customers, shareholders, colleagues and society has been my biggest strength
Why is it that today’s students are unable to derive as much learning from their education institutions as we did in our generation? Not that they are any less bright, on the contrary every young person one interacts with demonstrates a thirst for knowledge and world awareness that is always encouraging. What we may have lost in our education processes is the ability to instill a sense of agency and urgency in the student community and with an agenda of skilling and making worthy citizens of 300 million and more young people in our country, encouraging young people to take responsibility for their learning and aspiration to make their place in the world is a must.
The Pune Lighthouse initiative is one major experiment that we hope will contain all the elements that hold the key to transformation – agency building to life skills development, counseling to mentoring and coaching and finally the imparting of “just in time” skills in areas chosen by each individual students rather than being decided by a parent or teacher as a “must-learn” curriculum! Today the abundant availability of content on virtually every topic under the sun makes it possible to build a programme of learning that is optimised to the interest as well as the learning ability and speed of the individual and educators must take advantage of technology, integrate that into the learning curriculum and build a path the encourages every student to learn!
And beyond the brick walls of institutions surely the real learning occurs from people. Apart from the five women who have taught me most of what I know, I can credit numerous bosses, friends, colleagues and friends with whatever wisdom gleaned from mountains of data and information and career experiences. All of us go through these experiences and what we are able to learn and apply to become better inhabitants of this planet is really what makes the difference! Each one of us reading this magazine have within us the ability to positively influence at least a dozen people each year. Formal learning, except for the lucky few ceases at an early age and those who have developed the ability to learn continuously and are privileged to have good L&D processes in their organisations and mentoring and coaching facilities to hone their technical, business and life skills are always more likely to climb the ladder of success faster.
By Ganesh Natarajan
