Infosys founder N.R. Narayana Murthy reposed faith in teachers to mould the new generation and said the future of India depended on the teaching community more than any other category of professionals.
He was interacting with students of the Regional Institute of Education (RIE) in the city on Friday. He said every child that receives a good education should be grateful to teachers.
As a word of advice, Mr. Murthy said teachers should strive for changes in syllabi so as to enhance curiosity, increase observational skills and problem-solving abilities of students.
On the issue of technology as a game changer in teaching and learning in classrooms, Mr. Murthy said technology was a great enabler and enhanced productivity while reducing cost and time and cited examples such as the discovery of the wheel, printing press and telephone – all of which changed the world. He said technology had the power to bring the entire world on ones’ desktop but that did not mean that classroom teaching will lose its relevance to virtual learning.
In this context, Mr. Murthy said the way the teaching-learning process takes place in India was faulty as it entailed a monologue by the teacher while curious students who posed questions were branded ‘troublemakers’. Mr. Murthy said classrooms will remain important but should function as a medium of interaction with students initiating the transaction and teachers being the facilitators.
In the question and answer session with students, Mr. Murthy said the country had a great future, was growing fast and would present myriad opportunities for the present generation and a failure in one examination was not the end.
When asked about his preparations for the IIT entrance examination, Mr. Murthy said he had not been perturbed at that time. “My only interest was to go to Bengaluru to write the exam for the simple reason that I had not seen that city,” he said.
He said there were no coaching institutes then and so he and his friends posed questions to one another and solved problems that they could not resolve individually. However, in contemporary times there are coaching institutes and they have ‘destroyed’ IITs, said Mr. Murthy.
In reply to a question on importance of values, Mr. Murthy said values at a broad level were nothing but a set of norms that a community decides to follow in the collective interest of every other member of the community. “So it was important to lead by example and be the change that one wants to see in others as Mahatma Gandhi used to say,” he added.