The Universal Solidarity Movement I belong to is concerned about ethics in public life and in everyday life and living. Civic and professional education overlaps in different ways. Our educational system calls for a revamping, a re-designing, so that it is characterized by transparency, integrity and the enhancement of learners at every level. In the India of today, this is indeed a formidable challenge!

We live in a world of frantic changes. What is invented today becomes obsolete tomorrow. These times of changes are also times of violence and corruption. Old customs, and traditions have been discarded and new norms, mores and fads have not yet taken root. Many of us have not yet realized this, perhaps due to an insularity of caste and community which makes most of us ignorant and callous of how the other 85% Indians live, merely because it doesn’t touch us.

Toleration of violence and inducement to corruption are sadly learned at a tender age - in the family, in the classroom, among our peers and from the media. Such a situation demands reflection on education which teaches Mathematics and Computer skills with some competence but fails to teach anything significant about respect for women, kindness to servants, understanding each other’s customs, beliefs, traditions or religions.

Today we are desperate to learn new technical skills and to harness new technologies but have failed to see the traditional value of manual labour and cottage industries. Modern sciences compel interdisciplinary studies and encourage respect for change and exchange of other ways of thinking and perceiving. We Indians need to give up our narrow ways of thinking and learn from people of other countries.

In an educational system that believes in learning by rote, and rarely questioning authority, no matter how corrupt, encouraging heuristic modern pedagogies, where investigation and finding out for oneself, becomes mainstream; would not just be appropriate, but would bring about a breakthrough, a revamping and a restructuring in education.

What is needed today is a strong sense of responsibility in a society where caste identity and communal ideology have thrown the individual off balance and made them timid, shy and irresponsible. Instead of squabbling over religious traditions and looking for ethical groundwork, we need to go back to the Indian Constitution and study it thoroughly. Fortunately the Indian Constitution provides the basis for a rational humanistic and egalitarian education, based on an ethics of respect for all.