Ethics and value based education

Dr. D. Mukhopadhyay
To  call a spade a spade, it may be stated that everybody talks about ethics and value based education but it is hardly practised in reality.  Readers of this write up may agree that in the  aspect of human life,   the principal injury  comes from moral turpitude. Society is now directionless , it twists hither and thither with every twist of wind of immoral, illegal and opposed to public policy syndrome.  There are more than 785 Universities across the country but few of them teach ,  practice and  research on the issues concerning values and ethics because these disciplines does not make a person  so called wealthy and materialistic. Almost every University does have a Department namely Department of Philosophy but  can hardly  find any students who want to be  learned philosophers and serve the society. A person has to work for the whole mankind so that transformation from one stage of life to next higher stage of life is possible but it is  a matter of tragedy  that there is tremendous dearth of such human beings who are driven  ethically and based on moral values to serve the mankind in particular and the society in general. Morality, honesty and integrity have been back seated in the society due to non availability of teaching and research in this discipline. There is  severe dearth of  social investment in the discipline of ethics and value education in the educational institutions. There is material advancement of the society due to the blessings of science and technology but everything is becoming mechanistic. It may be observed that  people’s literacy rate is increasing,  use of science and technology in day  today life is in increasing trend but  social happiness and condition of human life is rarely visible. The positive aspect of science and technology is   being used for negative and destructive  causes. Human life has been suffering from  more and more complexity despite of having sufficient wealth and that is due to absence of ethics and value based education. Education is the best possible method or tool to transmit honesty, integrity and ethical values into the youth. Ethical and value based education has to be imparted to the youth because only youth can create or destroy.  Indian  civilization  is  five thousand years old and Indian’s soul  is based on the foundation of moral, ethical and value based education  whose  genesis is the Gita, Vedas, Quran, the Ramayana, the Mahabharata and many more philosophical literature and studies. But people are not exposed to this kind of literature.
Thus social problems remain problems only. Morality and value based education cannot be injected into mind of the students  only by University teachers but by the persons who practice integrity and honesty too. Every stream of studies become so mechanistic that it  transforms a human being only to a machine but can hardly transform into a noble hearted man who can transform the society from the evils that rule the society. People  visit religious places to purify their minds from the sins they commit under mechanical social environment but  never think of  ethics and values. Universities are temples of learning and best places for  obtaining education in ethics and values. There are hundreds of qualified professors who can transform the youth from evil society but now a days  students are hardly found to be interested in this kind of education. Job oriented courses  are overcrowded since there is good degree of probability  to get a job at the end of the course but ethics and values  play an important role in discharging the duties and responsibilities in the place of work. Ethics and values are the sources of strength and not impediment in the path of  career advancement.
Modern companies  according A. B. Carroll are based on fours causes of existence. First  Economic Cause, secondly Legal Cause, thirdly Ethical and finally Philanthropic Cause and Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) is  based on these four pillars.  Thus multinational companies  do business for profit that  is economic cause but not illegally, immorally and not unethically. Though Milton Friedman , Nobel Laureate in Economics in 1972 says that business of business is only to do business just for profit. This is obviously  a debatable issue but there is spiritual place of ethics and values in business too.  It may not be out of place to mention that it is the law in the Universities and higher learning institutions in India  to frame the curriculum as per the whims and fancies of the funding bodies and they invariably neglect the  programmes  which cannot generate alluring return on investment.  In simplicity, educational organizations need to involve themselves in the action of creativity and innovation and Philosophy as a means of ethics and value based education ignites the fire that remain within everybody in order to create something and innovate something.
The fundamental purpose of education is to generate consciousness among the students about social wellbeing.  Sir Albert Einstein used to believe that education would make somebody reach higher status in social life. Plato used to argue that educated soul has to use his knowledge and skill for solving the problems of the society. Ethics and value has primary role in character building. Only a man of  noble character can do good for the society  and that ethics and value based education is the source of wellbeing of the society. Behaviour of a man depends on character  and character building  depends what kind of education it has received on.  Ethics and Virtues and values should be  made compulsory constituents of modern educational curriculum and the traditional system needs to be  brought back to the society.
(The author is Professor of Management, School of Business, Faculty of Management, Shri Mata Vaishno Devi University, Katra, J & K)
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