Sudha Murty urges govt to provide funds to promote storytelling in schools

Rajya Sabha MP Sudha Murty on Tuesday urged the union government to provide funds to schools to build halls where students can be taught values through storytelling.

Participating in a debate on the Budget in the Rajya Sabha, the engineer-turned-philanthropist said the Budget is particularly good for the middle-classes.

While welcoming the budget, she stressed that children should be taught values to make them good citizens.

"We can teach children AI, computer science, mathematics etc, but you are not making our children good citizens. A good character, value based education, we are not able to do that," Murty said.

"It is very difficult to bring up children without a value system because ultimately they do not become good citizens even though they may be highly educated people," she said.

Murty added that just moral science classes won't help either.

"Once I was working in a school village. Many parents, especially mothers, came to me and said our children don't listen to us, they don't read, they are not interested in doing any other work, give us a solution. I said there is no quick solution, let's experiment..." she said.

"We built one big air conditioned hall, and there I kept some children's story books. I told them if you teach them good values through stories it is possible to hold their attention and they may learn by this. We gave them little material and visited after one year. Things were so different after one year. Children were attracted to the AC room in summer, and went to the hall where they could do many indoor activities. Along with that good value system," she said.

"If you want to attract children to school, you should have a big hall. You should have teachers and volunteers who can tell stories," she said, urging the union government to make allocations for this.

"The Government of India, with National Education Policy, has revised the due syllabus. I appreciate it," she added.

She said India has a story telling tradition, and mentioned some images found on a cup discovered at the archaeological site of Lothal.

"It is a very small cup, on it there is a story... A crow is sitting on a bowl, and has a stone in his mouth, we all know this story..." she said.

"We should have compulsory story telling sessions, have teachers' training inclusive of storytelling, and if possible, we should have an institution built over time for storytelling," she said.

"I request the finance minister, particularly at high school level, to require this new art to be introduced in their life, and the government should India should give a little more funding for building a room, with AC or fan," she added.