Whilst Hillary Clinton continued to fly the flag for old-style business and competition being involved in all aspects of society – in a manner that suggests the American administration has learned little from the economic collapse of the last two years, Aamir Khan provided a more rounded view of the qualities that education should be seeking to foster when the two chaired a session at St. Xavier’s College on Saturday.
“Today, students are mostly focusing on memorizing their subjects because they have to face questions like ‘Did you come first?’, ‘How much did you score in mathematics?” said Aamir, who is the Brand Ambassador for the Teach India programme. “I would like to hear teachers telling students: ‘Hey, your friend is weak in this subject, would you help him?’ This will incorporate the feeling of sharing and caring among students and will help in making them good individuals. We should teach our kids to be caring.”
Both Clinton and Khan agreed that teaching should be a high-paid profession. “Teaching should be a high paying job so that youngsters should aim at becoming teachers. I would like to see that one day in India, teaching is the most highly paid job,” Aamir explained. “We should give so much value to teaching as a profession that every kid that comes out of school and college should feel that he or she wants to be a teacher.”
