Practical Knowledge Is The Best Teacher

Kaiz Patel, director, Kaiz Consultancy Services explains Reema Sisodia on the need for hotel management courses to stop their tilt on theory and focus on practical training

Theory and practical inputs for hotel management students must be based on an inside-out approach. The old model of education is outside-in. It treats knowledge as a 'commodity'. Being part and parcel of the hospitality industry, both as a student and a teacher, I can speak with experience that it is high time the industry took a closer look at the curriculum, its approach and the end result it aims to attain. Repetitive narrations of the course and the syllabus without any concrete hardcore practical experience will only produce recruits sound in theory but not practicals.

Teachers know the subject and pass it on to a fresh batch of students who will be evaluated on how well they have written the answer paper in the examination. The ones who pen down such bookish knowledge successfully are labelled as toppers. But is this the right approach? Is mugging up the subject without understanding the real picture an ideal way of becoming a a professional? There is more to knowledge than studying the subject to clear exams. This approach would be of no use in the long run since selective learning and studying just to clear exams is sheer waste of productive time.

What is important is that one have a complete understanding and command over the subject - understanding is more powerful than knowledge. When you learn inside-out you reach your own insight rather than adopt someone else's view. For example, I can describe how wine is made and served very eloquently and maybe I can demonstrate it, but I cannot expect you to become proficient in it unless you have tried to do it with your own efforts. No words of any expert can substitute individual first-hand experience. Education must be like a direction to the experience not a dictation of the experience.

As a concluding remark, I would like to repeat that the practical training that students undergo as part of the curriculum is far too less to give them a complete picture of the industry and the reality associated with the profession. The students should also be made to understand why certain things are done in a particular way and teachers/supervisors should allow innovations and comments made by the students to be implemented.

Overseas hotel management institutes dedicate almost 50 per cent of the course to practical on-the-job training so as to keep the students abreast with the latest innovations in the industry as well as to learn first-hand.