“The IT industry has earned 17 billion dollars for India, 1/5 of the national budget, all managed and maintained by the private and public school graduate. Shouldn’t these schools be praised and not constantly denigrated and discouraged?”
The best definition which I find most appropriate – ‘Education is what a child carries through life after having forgotten what the text books have taught.’ Education should not just restrict itself to the mugging the notes but it must give a child values, confidence and the capacity to face challenges.

When I was minister for women and child, we established that the child was getting permanent deformities because of the heavy bags. And we did all we could to reduce the weight of those bags.

There should be supervision especially on the fee structure. Fees are going up to 10,000 a month. I was paying Rs. 15  a month right through school, and in Mount Carmel College, I paid Rs.25 a month. What some of these private schools are charging is disgraceful.

I believe moral education is very, very important. I studied in a convent school in Mangalore where we had to do one hour of social work every day, and we learnt morality as we went along. It did not have to become a subject, it was a lifestyle. Each student was given a vegetable plot – in that, we grew our own plants, swept our own classrooms. Sweeping, dusting, cleaning, keeping the chairs in order so that the class is ready for the next day – the duties rotated, and it developed character within us, even as we learnt the dignity of team work. We had a daily assembly in which we sang a national song, there was a lot of nationalist feeling and love for society. Now these things are all being phased out and the result is that nationalism is not being encouraged in the younger generation.