Education and its past, present and future was the talking point at The Telegraph Young Metro Principals' Meet 2016 presented by the JIS Group recently.

Principals and teachers from 90-odd schools in and around Calcutta attended the meet to listen to Rudrangshu Mukherjee, the editor of The Telegraph in Schools, speak on the topic Against Utilitarian Education.

Drawing insights and anecdotes from life, Mukherjee explained how Indian education needs to liberate the minds of students. "Somewhere, this education system is not equipping our students to think. Cultivation of a critical mind is absent. It wasn't always like this. My father went to a Bengali-medium school and wrote better English than I did. He could write with equal ease in Bengali and English, that is not the same for me," he said.

He urged principals to "create aware individuals with their minds open who can create a better tomorrow not just for India but for the world as well". "I want you to think about how you can be agents of this change. My humble suggestion is that one way all of us who have some involvement in education, we need to think of certain steps and then to initiate, at least in our lifetime, the process of change through which education moves from chasing success to chasing knowledge. This is the purpose of my talk this evening. I would want education to be less and less and less utilitarian."

Seema Sapru, the principal of The Heritage School, found Mukherjee's observations relevant. "We have to keep learning and teachers have to change with the students. Also, it is not only about learning English. One needs to know the mother tongue with equal comfort. That's not there, today," she said.

Angela Ghose, the principal of Union Chapel School, said: "What he said today was relevant as teaching has become about board exams and syllabus. We don't teach our children to cope with failure. They have to be street- smart and students as well as teachers shouldn't have a tunnel vision when it comes to education. Education should be an experience with a learning outcome," she said.

The evening also saw a presentation from Gopal Debnath, manager, brand marketing and administration, JIS, on the institute's contribution in the field of education.

Also present on the occasion were two officials of the state department of school education - Dibya Gopal Ghatak, deputy director (physical education), and Amiya Ranjan Sanyal, deputy director (Anglo Indian Schools). "Career-hunting shouldn't be the goal of a parent or a teacher. The career of a student should depend on his or her potential," Sanyal said.