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STUDENTS SHOULD SEE THAT DEGREE CARRIES POSITIVE KNOWLEDGE
“The view that there had been a marked deterioration in the educational attainments of the student-world of the present generation was expressed by Dr. B. R. Ambedkar, addressing a meeting of students of the Scheduled Castes held at the Students’ Hall, Calcutta yesterday (Tuesday) afternoon 2nd January 1945.* Prof. J. C. Mondal of St. Paul’s College presided.
In his speech Dr. Ambedkar attacked the All-India Students’ Federation and asked the students to dissociate themselves from it and form an all-India organisation of the Scheduled Castes.
The All-India Students’ Federation was a well-known body, he said, about whose activities they had often read. There was for some reason a separate organisation formed-Muslim Studentseven there. He did not know the reasons but the Muslim students found it necessary to start their own organisation.
Many of them probably did not know, remarked the speaker, that politics was not his usual pasture. He had been driven into it. The field to which he took delight, the field to which he hoped to return after his term expired was the educational field. He had been a professor of economics and law and therefore he might be forgiven if he made some trenchant comments on the All-India Students’ Federation from his intimate experience of the student world.
Dr. Ambedkar had no hesitation in saying that education in India had considerably deteriorated at present. Comparing the first products of their universities with the students that he had met during his professorial career, he had no hesitation in saying that there had been a marked deterioration in educational attainments of the student world. Mentioning in this connection the names of Justice Ranande, Bal Gangadhar Tilak, Gokhale, Sir Surendra Nath and Sir Sivaswamy Iyer, Dr. Ambedkar said : “I do not think I shall be regarded as very hostile or very ungenerous if I say that none of you of this generation would reach even the knees of those people.”
- Source of Date—Janata : dated 6th January 1945.