Teach India Campaign – does it have a motif?

Well after the mega launch of the Teach India campaign by leading English daily, I have come to realize that it is just a way of ensuring that the newspaper is nurturing their readers for their future mass readership base in the rural segment cutting across caste and creed. All said and done the program itself is a wonderful idea, but when one looks hard at the newspapers ad promotion campaign, it kind of looks with business interest in the next 15 years or so. This very same paper had launched one campaign in the form of promoting the school children in the cities through (NIE) to get into the habit of reading newspapers. But after two decades of running this program they have planned to shelve the idea since the top think tanks of the company know very well that this program has achieved more than what they asked for.
So one may ask am I mad! No I am not, well look at it from a pure businessman’s view. The teach India camping will set a sense of the missing knowledge rather than teaching knowledge.
The below theory is according to the little bit of knowledge which I have gained over the past two decades working in different media organizations including the one I am talking about.
The Times of India, for one media organization will never venture out with any gains on the longer run. Since the NIE as produced more than the targeted results for upping the market value and brand image of the newspaper in cities, the ‘Teach India’ is designed at ensuring that it produces the same result in the rural sector for the next 15 years. This newspaper has figured that after a stagnation of their readership base in the cities, hence hit the rural sector which in another 15 years will be potential market venue.
So club the education principal like the NIE but tweak it to the taste and standard of the rural sector.
Education many say should be imparted without any pre motifs in mind, but most modern day educators differ on this. Education is imparted with trust between the pupil and the guru. Education my mother said was imparted for generations with one motif, which the future generations get to learn greater human values.
So keeping all this in mind I do not personally prescribe to the Times of India’s ‘Teach India’ campaign. To push ones own self interest into pupils mind is a hard sell but modern day business is to sell what ever it takes, but sell at the end of the day, which the TOI follows religiously.
But education to used as a medium to gain these is not healthy for the future generation of the country and as Bill Beattie puts it “The aim of education should be to teach us rather how to think, than what to think – rather to improve our minds, so as to enable us to think for ourselves, than to load the memory with thoughts of other men”.