A few months back I was in an interview board to select a group of students for a project called ‘earn while you learn’ launched by the College. Five students of the College were selected to try their hands at library management for Rajabala Das Library. Later all the trainees successfully completed the apprenticeship, earned remunerations and certificates. But the real reward, to my mind, was that the girls learned a new trade.
Learning a trade or a skill set has never been so easy. Now-a-days there are plenty of free and paid portals where one can acquire proficiency in different fields, unimaginable a few years back. The New Education Policy, 2020 has also opened floodgates to the world of newer and newer skills.
Getting oneself equipped with new skills is no longer an option before the students, it is a necessity of the present age: one has to adapt or perish. It is an age of second ‘Cognitive Revolution’, the term first used by Noam Chomsky, the American philosopher and linguist, and later made popular by Yuval Noah Harari, who in his bestseller, Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind says, ‘The earth of a hundred millennia ago was walked by at least six different species of man.’
Oh really? Then what happened to the homo erectus, homo floresiensis, homo luzonensis and the Neanderthals? All extinct! The homo sapiens have left behind their less fortunate cousins not by dint of physical strength, but due to their capacity for flexible thinking, large-scale cooperation, and rapid adaptation
The present four year undergraduate programme itself has many of these advantages ingrained in it. The students need only to come out of their comfort zones and be smart enough to soak in the nutrients.
