Craftsmanship in Education – Asia InCH – Encyclopedia of Intangible Cultural Heritage

YOUR VIEWS

My paper is about the great opportunity that lies in the blending of three streams of activities, namely, Education, Design and Crafts with an intention of building creative human resources for the future of India. I am acutely aware of the fact that we will need to define all the terms that we are using here since there is bound to be a host of interpretations for each of these depending on our individual pursuits or our native disciplines. Craft has never been easy to define nor has Design or for that matter Education. However, over the past ten or fifteen years we have internally used a fairly consistent definition of these very terms at the National Institute of Design which I will attempt to share with you in the context of our at NID. Some of these have been tested with our efforts at the education of young designers and in the education and training of young craftspersons at the new institutes that we helped conceive and set up in recent years. Learning and education are not easy concepts to grapple with and in the context of the very young learner, at the school level, I must confess that I do not have the direct experience of teaching or working with the school system to expound on the subject of inputs into the school level education, but having dealt with the products of that education for so many years I feel we need to seriously look into some of the pertinent issues in the context of this conf...