NEW DELHI - Education should be a liberating process, not something “which constricts you”, president of the Indian Council for Cultural Relations Karan Singh said here Monday.

Singh was delivering a lecture on The Four Pillars of Education to mark the collaboration between IILM, a management institute and a Kolkata-based think tank, Global India Foundation.

Stating that India was a dialogic civilisation, Singh said that educators should encourage the asking of questions in the classroom.

This is deeply embedded in our culture. The scriptures from Upanishads to Gita are all based on dialogue, on asking questions, he said.

He felt that India had not given adequate attention to providing vocational education. We have very good IITs, but what we really need are thousands of people graduating from ITIs, he said, referring to Industrial Training Institutes.

Earlier, presiding over the function, Indira Gandhi National Open University vice-chancellor V.N. Rajasekharan Pillai said that one of the important parts of education was unlearning.

It is very important to think about learning, about unlearning. Unlearning mean throwing away prejudice, mindset.. so that one can learn new things, said Pillai.