Mita Mukherjee
West Bengal chief minister Mamata Banerjee on Monday stressed the need to include “moral character building” a part of school syllabus.
Addressing the Teachers’ Day function in Kolkata to felicitate teachers, the chief minister asked state education minister, Bratya Basu, who was also present at the function, to take necessary steps about framing the syllabus and find out what could be taught under this subject.
“ Topics on the preaching of great men like Swami Vivekananda should be taught to students in schools,” she said.
Elaborating on the need for schools to teach morality to students, the chief minister said it is not always important to own a lot of money and a person is not known by the amount of money he or she owns.
“ It doesn’t matter how much money one has. How much money one owns is not the only identity of an individual. One must realise that money will come and go. The money you have today can perish tomorrow. One must also realise how much money is required. It depends on an individual on whether he would remain honest or not,” she said while delivering her speech.
She said that we must also understand that all fingers are not the same and so it was unfair to malign the entire society for the misdeeds of some bad people.
“All fingers are not the same. There are good people in the society. At the same time there are bad people too. Therefore, for some bad people it would not be fair to malign each and everyone in the society,” the chief minister said.
According to her, some good persons get involved in misdeeds and corruption because of their association with bad people.
The chief minister’s announcement on introducing moral character building to school students and the following statements are significant as they come at a time when the ruling Trinamul Congress is saddled with multiple charges of corruption.
Former state education minister Partha Chatterjee and Trinamul Congress strongman Anubrata Mandal, have been recently arrested in connection with school teacher recruitment scam and cattle smuggling case respectively.
The chief minister admitted that there had been some mistakes in the teacher recruitment process. But she claimed that the state government was unable to rectify those mistakes because of too many Public Interest Litigation (PIL).
“I admit that there were some mistakes. We could have rectified them long before. But now there are too many PILs. The problems can’t be solved because of the legal hassles,” she said.
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