EMPOWERING EACH LEARNER FOR THE 21st CENTURY..
The Learner of the 21st century arrives with more challenges to face rather than more comforts to live with. This certainly calls for empowering him or her with essential core skills, which will help him to face the reality with conviction and courage, plan, and avoid natural and man-made disasters, co-exist with difference better understood, and find a better meaning for his existence. Mr. G. Balasubramanian, former director (Academics), CBSE at National Conference of Sahodaya (CBCE) held here today at Campion School Bhopal. He presented a presentation on Changes need in the learner of the 21st century and responsibilities of schools and teachers accept new technologies as challenges. In this conference there are a battery of eminent scholars present to share their experiences, knowledge and ideologies.
"The sole motive of education was to open new vistas to thinking, understanding and knowledge, and the school, as a vital organ for people's education. The new system must serve that end effectively", pointed out Mr. Subramaniam.
He said that need for constructivism is important in learning process means it would be really mean that each learner has to be empowered to construct his own learning process and cycle, depending on the individual needs. Inter- disciplinary learning is the second component of importance. Learning would become increasingly inter-disciplinary, more by need, than compulsion.
"Even now we can see that education is becoming high-tech and digital. The day is not far when the student will learn online at his / her home, and would not physically be present at schools". He Added.
Mr. Ashish Rajpal, Educator with I Discover, he is involving in creating and facilitating learning programs on teacher development, leadership, innovation, and cultural transformation.
He said, that we have to focus on improving the learning for children in schools, a passionate advocates of quality in classrooms and entrepreneurial effort in school, and personal assessment as tools for learning and creativity. There is some point that would change in schools like write memory, for all the concepts would be practical and would be easy to get for students, and most important that children should know what they are? If these changes are done in classrooms then education would be more effective and easy.
Mr. Christian Stevens, Head, Riverdeep Interactive Learning ltd. Australia, spoke on the learning process " in my opinion first the teacher has to analysis his / her student and also about interest of the student. After this some kind of experiments could help learning easily and it will be long lived." `It's like creating thirst in the horse so that it drinks water, do not take the horse to the pond for drinking water". I Think, learning to know, learning to do, and learning to live together. About the concept of co-learning of disability student with normal student he says that it would be very difficult because it is not possible that the teacher could pay attention to individual student in class.
Vineet Joshi, chairman CBSC spoke on difference of opinion on `Empowerment'. Giving his belief on the subject, he went on to say it meant quality education, skills development and different modes and practices of teaching. He said confusion in understanding the term is also creating various approaches of teaching, ultimately causing more confusion than content. He said most important was to empower individual learner. The teacher should develop his or her own teaching techniques based on optimum success in goal. The further said that the teacher should give more importance to self-development and should abide by the changing scenario of education needs in the 21 st century. Today we need to eliminate the traditional methods of learning and adopt modern techniques involving the best in technology.

Symposium on 'Terrorism versus Humanitarianism" in Bhopal
Bhopal, December 9 (Pervez Bari): A symposium is being organised to mark the International Human Rights Day by Madhya Pradesh Human Rights Commission at T.T.T.I auditorium here at 11 am on December 10. The topic of the symposium will be 'Terrorism versus Humanitarianism'.
Chief guest at the symposium will be retired justice of the Supreme Court and former member of National Human Rights Commission Justice Shivraj Patil while the main speaker will be Gandhian-thinker Padma Vibhushan Justice Chandrashekhar Dharmadhikari. The function will be presided over by chairperson of Madhya Pradesh Human Rights Commission Justice D.M. Dharmadhikari.
Former Rajya Sabha member and retired Justice A.G. Qureshi, Commissioner Public Relations Manoj Shrivastava, retired chief engineer Santosh Tiwari, educationist Mrs. Shashi Rai, D.I.G. Ms. Anuradha Shankar and senior journalist Akhtar Hussain will also put forth their views. (pervezbari@eth.net)