New Delhi: Vice-President M Venkaiah Naidu today called for including the cultural heritage of the country and its basic human values in the school curriculum and called on the people to speak in their mother tongue and learn each other’s languages. Speaking at a function to present the National Teacher Award to 319 meritorious teachers, Mr Naidu urged civil society to come forward to help achieve the target of 100 per cent literacy in five years. The awardee teachers included nearly 100 women teachers. Twenty-four teachers were associated with the field of information technology. On this occasion, the Vice-President also launched the National Teachers Portal ‘DIKSHA’. Referring to the contribution of former President Dr Sarvapalli Radhakrishnan, Naidu, comparing a Guru to ‘Brahma’ , said his teachers had a big contribution to his reaching the position he had in life today. He, however, lamented that today good teachers were becoming an ‘extinct species’ . Referring to the cultural and linguistic diversity and unity of India, he said,’We should be proud of being Indians.
Also, India’s cultural heritage and human values should be included in the school curriculum.’ Mr Naidu advocated inclusion of physical education, music, crafts etc. in the school curriculum. He said Indian languages are very beautiful and stressed the need to focus attention on our mother tongue. ‘In every home, we should talk only in our mother tongue,’ he said. He regretted that in day-to-day life we prefer to speak in English rather than our mother tongue despite the fact that we do not even have complete knowledge of that language. ‘But when the Prime Minister or President of Russia or France or any other country comes to India, he speaks in his own native language and his speech is translated through an interpreter,’ he said. The Vice-President also advised the people of North India to learn the languages of residents of Western India and the people of South India to learn the languages of those from North India. ‘This will also strengthen the unity of the country,’ he said.
Speaking on the occasion, Minister for Human Resources Development Prakash Javadekar said, ‘In our times, it was teachers, rather than money, that had a lot of respect.’ ‘However, in today’s society, it is the rich who are respected. It is only a society which gives respect to teachers that achieves progress,’ he said. Stressing the need for training of teachers, Javadekar said that in the next two years, eleven lakh teachers have to get training through ‘swayam’. ‘For this they have to register online till September 15. This is the last chance for these teachers. Those who do not pass this training in 2019 could lose their job,’ he said. Mr Javadekar also urged the teachers to help transform society and lives of the people and said this was the time of ‘Digital Black Board’ instead of ‘Operation Black Board’.
