DHNS
Mangalore Feb 15: "Education reduces us from the nature's gift of personality into just an anatomy. Nature creates us to be human beings, but education converts us into machines," said eminent writer and actor Prof G K Govinda Rao.
Speaking at the two-day national seminar on ‘Value-based education and literature’ organised by Besant Women’s College in association with Kannada Development Authority and DK district Kannada Sahitya Parishat at Besant Women’s College Auditorium on Thursday, he said “literature and art is a protest against the established norms of the society.
It has the strength to question the society. However, when you make a boundary for art, it disintegrates.
Religion and science has boundaries of script and rules, but literature and art has reverence only to life.” Terming Shakespeare and Vyasa as excellent playwrights, he said our notion about morality and immorality has gone wrong. The question about ethical and unethical literature must actually come out of classroom reading. Literature is also a religion and so is democracy. Democracy is a religion without a prophet or script. Everyone in a democracy is a potential ‘prophet,’ he added.
Kuvempu University, Shimoga department of English Chairman Dr Rajendra Chenni said literature is the mother of all values. Good literature is one that disturbs our complacency and pricks our mind to awaken from the numbness towards issues. It tells truth which can be bitter and unsettling.
However, literature can only facilitate interrogation and it must be accepted that way. Just as a mother cannot give all values to her child as it is, but be a medium for the child to earn it, literature too helps its reader incorporate values in life. We must give up the ‘Safe deposit locker’ thinking that literature is a repository which can be used whenever we want. Values in literature cannot be transferred easily to children even by teachers, but it must be earned by students themselves.
Kannada Sahitya Parishat President Pradeep Kumar Kalkura said a person must learn his mother tongue to acquire value education and to become creative.
Women’s National Education Society (WNES) President Kudpi Jagadish Shenoy, College Principal Dr Manjula K T, convenor Prof Pushpalatha B K, correspondent B Mohan Nayak and WNES secretary Prof P P Gomathi were present.
Dr Chenni inaugurated the seminar by writing on the easel after lighting the lamp.