27 July 2019

The Salesian Regional Commission of Education and Culture Meet – South Asia, was held on 26th – 27th July 2019, at the Don Bosco House SPCI House, New Delhi with the theme WAKING UP TO A NEW ERA IN EDUCATION. The meeting began with a prayer followed by Welcome and Introduction by Fr. Maria Charles, the Coordinator for Education and Culture for Don Bosco Provinces in South Asia. The first session was An analysis of New Draft of National Education Policy 2019 by Fr. Joseph Manipadam, Secretary for Education and Culture, CBCI. He started with the session by introducing the New Education policy and speaking about the key proposals and the changes proposed in the policy. He also spoke about the issues with the policy. He also briefed us about the suggestions which was made to the government by CBCI. At the end of the Session Fr. Joseph Manipadam quoted Dr. B. R. Ambedkar “Education is something which is ought to be brought within the reach of everyone, the policy there, ought to be to make higher education as cheap to the lower classes as it can possibly be made. If all these communities are brought to the level of equality, then the only remedy is to adopt the principle of inequality and give favoured treatment to those who are below level.” He Just asked a simple question to sum up his presentation “Can the National Education Policy 2019 get closer to this clarion call?

Anchor The second session was about preparing a Don Bosco Educational Institutions’ response to the draft of the National Education Policy 2019. Fr. Maria Charles brought out the various issues and problems connected with the policy and presented the draft to be sent to MHRD. Four groups were formed to discuss about the draft and give their point of view on it. The responses of the four groups were collated together. The Next Session was about ‘A specific understanding of Education and Culture’ and it was conducted by Fr. Albert Johnson, Secretary of Salesian Provincial Conference of South Asia (SPCSA). He spoke about the cultural variants and the culture of young people where we Educators have an important role to play. He stressed on the need for imparting cultural values and about creating awareness about pseudo culture spreading across our society rapidly.

The next session after lunch was on the Review of ‘Don Bosco Schools for Excellence’ in ten Provinces. There was a presentation of Don Bosco Accreditation and Assessment Policy and about setting Up AIDBES Accreditation Board. All the participants agreed to the Policy and some of them also suggested for the assessment to be carried out for the teachers too. They also suggested that there should be separate grade for the rural schools and the urban schools and the assessors should be from different provinces. The day ended with the last session which was on Transformative Leadership in educating young people. It was about an online survey conducted by AIDBES recently among school leaders in Salesian schools which revealed that the Transformative Leadership pattern is high among the school leaders of Don Bosco schools in India. The research brought to light that that the School Leaders follow high level of discernment process and have strong inclination towards transcendental leadership too.

The Second Day began with a short prayer and the delegates from the Provinces made their presentation about the current status of education in their respective provinces. They also presented various innovative measures started in their educational institutions.

 

The collated responses on the draft of the Educational policy was presented to the group and the participants were quite happy about the collated response and it was decided that the response would be sent to MHRD on the same day. The participants too wanted a copy of the same and they said they would send it as a response from the Provinces too.

In the next session, a draft of ‘Don Bosco School Policy’ was presented. The group expressed that this policy was well prepared and suggested the need for an accompanying manual to be prepared along with the School Policy. A small team constituted to compile the manual included Fr. Maria Charles, Fr. Davis Manipadam, Fr. John Parankimalil (PD) and Bro. Edwin Arokiadas. The team has planned to put together various policies and guidelines about schools together by the middle of August.

The final session of the Meeting was about the National Educational Conference of Don Bosco Schools (NECDBS) 2020 to be hosted by INK Province. Fr. Charles explained to the group about the past five national conferences and then Fr. Babu Manissery of INK welcomed the participants to the 6th National Conference. He said more information would be given by September. Fr. Maria Charles explained about the forthcoming national level advanced training for Don Bosco Teachers to be held on 23-26 September, 2019 Bangalore. He said that the teachers would have exposure to International speakers and the latest education technology. He also said that a few more seats were only available.

 

Next, he explained about SPCSA Theme on “Upholding the Constitutional values.” He presented the brochures and posters published by DBYA. Then he presented about the Trademark on Don Bosco -its present Status and the pending legal issues. He talked about regularizing and strengthening of the Association of Don Bosco Schools India. He presented various possibilities of working with reputed organizations like Cambridge Assessment, Stones2Milestones and Intel. The members expressed that they would collaborate in all these initiatives. At last, Fr. Charles presented about various researches done at AIDBES and also presented various publications in our education sector. He requested their cooperation in taking the research and publication forward.

The Meeting ended with a prayer and a concluding remark from Fr Maria Charles where he thanked all the participants for actively participating in this meeting. All the participants expressed deep joy and happiness and said that the two-day meeting was very useful and meaningful and they got a chance to learn a lot from the meeting.

Report prepared by:

Nishant Kumar