Need for Incorporation of Indigenous Values in Modern Education System
Authors: - Subhasree Pal , - Parimal Sarkar 
Published: September 2023

The vision of education is to inculcate life skills and employability skills among students. In the holistic approach to education, the emphasis is given to making future cosmopolitan citizens. Global citizenship is nothing but a collective approach to addressing all the problems that our Earth is now facing. Preserving natural heritage is now a prime concern to make human civilization sustainable in this world. Indigenous knowledge system flourishes based on a particular territory comprising all elements of that particular place through age-old practices, whereas the Western Education system establishes ignoring the local fragrance, Worldview of original habitats. Indigenous value system gives emphasis on the mutual co-existence of every species. The present education system based on Western culture and values fails to provide sustainable consistency to civilization. Greediness, the self-centred approach, materialistic behaviour, material culture, and ego-centric approach is the gift of Euro-centric pedagogy. Reckless and break-less development using natural resources indiscriminately is nothing but a mere projection of colonial industrial philosophy. Where the ideology of Education talks about turning humans into resources, their Euro-centric pedagogy makes them mere copy-paste of Frankenstein who destroys the very genre of life within the blink of an eye. Sustainable Development Goals ask for Quality Education, with which other goals of sustainable development are interlinked. Either alone the employability skills nor life skills cannot serve the purpose of the enrichment of humanity. The intermingling of both is a basic requirement of the Modern Education system. In this very context where the Euro-centric pedagogy fails to address the values of humanity in the Education system, the indigenous values of tribes are the preserver, protector, and builder of humanity. Indigenous values give due emphasis to communitarian resource management, the wise use of resources and their conservation. Where in our civilized society, we fight with our counterparts to snatch their rights, those indigenous counterparts fight unitedly with each other for their survival. In an advanced society, where we rush behind self-identity, there tribes settle with belongingness with every stakeholder of nature, be it living or non-living, be it with animals or plants. The goal of present education lies in achieving the aims of Sustainable Development Goals where indigenous value systems are necessary to incorporate to achieve desired success. Employability skills also should not be confined to those skills about how to use them, rather, it is now necessary to incorporate indigenous values in the mere concept of using by extending them to use and sustain them for the future. When employability skills of progressed World induce the concept of Superiority among us, the indigenous value system respects the omnipotence of Nature for our survival. The present paper will analyse the importance of indigenous values and how they should be incorporated into the modern education system to make it a holistic one in a real sense and to inculcate a sense of cosmopolitanism.