New Delhi, Nov. 10 :    New Delhi, Nov. 10:  Students in Delhi's Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) may spend their next summer vacation with non-governmental organisations, doing 'socio-spiritual' work as part of their training in value education. Recently, two workshops were held in the campus for putting together a value education 'package'. IIT faculty members want value education to be made a compulsory course for the students by next July. 'The whole environment is against value education and we can no longer afford to pay just lip-service to its need,' said Prof. R.R. Gaur, head of mechanical engineering, who played a key role in structuring the value education course. As soon as the institute receives money from the Centre, it will establish the National Resource Centre for Value Education in Engineering. Value education is not entirely a new concept in the IIT curriculum. For more than a decade, it has been offering an elective course in science and humanism. 'But this was more an indirect way of teaching value education. The time has now come to address the issue directly,' Gaur said. The 'threat', he added, comes from forces of liberalisation and also from secularists, who have alleged that value education is equivalent to 'saffronisation'. 'Any talk about value education immediately makes the secularists sit up and they think it is an attempt to saffronise education and culture,' the professor said. He insisted that the basic thrust of their package will be on combining professionalism with ethics and nationalism. In this backdrop, a course in value education gains special importance. This time, it will not be just a course in science and humanism but an entire package. The four-year curriculum will begin in the first year and include a series of intensive discussions between groups of students and teachers. For instance, a teacher will be in charge of a group of 10 students, who at the end of four years will be asked to respond to situations of moral dilemma. 'This will be part of an assessment of their personalities,' Gaur said. On the kind of evaluation it would be, Gaur said nothing concrete has been worked out yet. But he has suggestions like presenting a hypothetical situation before a student where he or she has to choose between money and morality. Some faculty members are concerned about the increasing trend among students to just 'make money' and a 'mad' rush to join the information technology sector. The course aims to tackle this 'problem' by exposing students to social and practical realities. 'We feel that value education should be integrated with the National Social Service (NSS) and other cultural activities,' Gaur said. Before launching the course, orientation courses will be held for teachers. There are already some 25-odd faculty members who have shown keen interest in teaching the course. 'There will have to be a couple of permanent faculty members for this course and the rest can be part-timers,' Gaur said.