The Indian Express (Delhi Edition)
Have you heard the teacher?
Their grumble, however inaudible, takes a heavy toll on the nation. The cost multiplies with each passing year
Pressure to conform has been the school teachers’ lot all along , and now that pressure covers the college and university teacher as well. Badgered by CCTV and the routine demand for uploading evidence, school teachers have lost what little autonomy they had before the advent of digital life. Such circumstances have encouraged distrust towards the teacher to grow exponentially. I recall my watershed moment when a private school principal in Surat boasted: ‘ I can show you what is going on in every classroom without rising from my chair.’
THERE IS NO standard operating procedure for reforming education. Every country tries it in its own way. One can’t think of a country where radical changes happened amidst widespread resentment and melancholia among teachers. Melancholia is the right term to describe the psychological state wherein both anger and cynicism have proved insufficient for achieving mental peace. Why teachers are not involved in choosing the changes they are supposed to implement is just a one mark question. Everyone can guess the correct answer — that teachers are not trusted in our system. They are perceived as culprits. It is no easy task to show that they are, in fact, victims.
“Anyone can teach”, is a common view. Earlier this year, Bihar decided to use retired policemen as teachers. I am sure they brought in hard discipline among children. That’s what our schools lack, many believe, and hold teachers responsible. Many others feel that teachers don’t want to work, so they don’t deserve the salary they get. This line of thought has led to popular endorsement of the low- pay policy that the vast majority of private schools follow. And then there is the view that teachers form an obstacle to reforms, so the only way to bring changes is by forcing teachers to adapt.
Administrators who deal with teachers with a heavy hand are praised and remembered. Stories of how they suspended someone on the spot circulate as proof of a time when no one came late or left early, and exam results shot up. This is the ultimate indicator of quality even if the examination system is derided too. Comparisons between government and private school teachers always show the former in a poor light, furnishing easy justification for parental preferences for private schools. On top of every other complaint is the charge that teachers indulge in politics. Dismantling their unions is the path several state governments have taken over the recent decades.
Pressure to conform has been the school teachers’ lot all along, and now that pressure covers the college and university teacher as well. Badgered by CCTV and the routine demand for uploading evidence, school teachers have lost what little autonomy they had before the advent of digital life. Such circumstances have encouraged distrust towards the teacher to grow exponentially. I recall my watershed moment when a private school principal in Surat boasted: “I can show you what is going on in every classroom without rising from my chair.” It was early in the century, and the CCTV coverage in that school was already comprehensive. No teacher or child was beyond the camera’s eye. This was a heady advance over mere firing on the spot. In Delhi, the government gained popular approval when it offered a link of CCTV surveillance to parents.
All these years, governments assumed they knew how to sort out teachers. A new, strange challenge has now surfaced and no state directorate is sure of what to do. The coaching industry has stumped the pundits of education. Coaching has usurped secondary education in both government and private schools. Historically, secondary level teachers were responsible for preparing children for board exams. They still do that, but the coach has munched away at this job. By calling its employees “teachers”, the coaching industry has quietly changed the mould that defined both teaching and the format of exams. Multiple choice questions ( MCQS) are the dominant currency of knowledge now. It gives the class teacher just one choice: To conform.
The distinction between coaching and teaching was once important, but the market has brought them closer. The coach has a limited objective and he — most publicised coaches are male — plays a narrow role in an adolescent’s life. A teacher, on the other hand, faces the full gamut of needs that adolescence brings, in addition to academic demands. In many lives, the secondary teacher plays a decisive role, and is often remembered with gratitude.
Teachers of primary and pre- primary classes play an even more decisive role, but they are seldom remembered. Nor are they recognised within the system, especially by administrators. The primary teacher has no status in our society and the early childhood teacher has even less. She performs the sensitive task of inducting the child into a community of knowledge in every field, creating predispositions that shape the child’s interests and intellectual energy. These words mean little in our system. Both tradition and the rule structure uphold the norm that the younger the child you teach, the lower your status and salary.
All teachers are produced by the higher education system, and that is now the new frontier of breathless reforms. Within the last few sessions, huge shifts in established practice have occurred. They include the semester system, four- year undergraduate programme, centralised admission through a MCQ- based test. Teachers have been critical and sceptical of these tectonic changes. The senior, outgoing generation of teachers is frustrated. Filling of vacancies poses an intractable problem because the backlog is so huge. For many years now, ad hoc teachers have kept the system going. With their careers compromised, they feel deeply unhappy. A swelling workload and an increasing student- teacher ratio have rendered them incapacitated for professional growth.
Their job is just as important as that of junior doctors, but universities and colleges have no emergency ward. Victims of a prejudiced public perception, teachers are used to the rhetoric repeated on Teachers’ Day. Yes, it is a day to renew one’s idealism, to feel inspired, but for a vast number of teachers today, it is hard to ignore the daily grind and ignominy. Teachers’ Day is a good occasion to remember that no nation can escape paying a heavy price for making its teachers chronically unhappy. Their grumble, however inaudible, takes a heavy toll on the nation’s human resource, and the cost multiplies with each passing year.