Dear Editor,
Teachers’ Day was just celebrated; teachers were rewarded with scintillating sacred words as always – like reciting traditional mantras. As a teacher, I myself also like it when students show their respect by sending beautiful messages on this day. Yet two troubling questions always haunt me. First, as teachers, are we really committed to the spirit of our profession? Second, does most of society really care about the teacher fraternity? We need to respond to these questions by honestly looking at ourselves in the mirror and with social context. To begin with, there is a need to go beyond that definition of a teacher’s custom and pattern i.e., one who teaches prescribed courses, disciplines students, conducts examinations and on answer sheets in order to obtain officially certified degrees and certificates as a teacher. Gives points How many of us are really inclined to realize that this is a narrow and confining notion because the teacher So there must be a person who becomes a co-traveler of his students, makes them aware of science, poetry, history, literature, agriculture and life-useful arts like carpentry etc. Above all, teaches the rhythm of life and death. Think of great educationists such as Rabindra Nath Tagore or Jiddu Krishnamurthy or John Dewey and Paulo Frere. He saw many options in the art of teaching. He realized that a teacher can reinforce a student’s desire to learn with empathy and dialogue. A teacher can instill love and affection in his disciple. The morality of caring can be planted, a teacher who instills in his students a sensitivity to nature. However, in this hyper-competitive era, where schools are judged by the success stories of the toppers, teaching-learning seems to have been left with nothing but root words written in books and the practice of conducting examinations. . No wonder, there was no distinction between the teachers and the strategist turned coaching centers who groom the students like mere ‘Pariksha-Veer’. That’s how we in that society who are not ready to celebrate the profession of teaching in the true sense. Because when rationalism and neo-liberalism began to shape the course of education, a teacher was asked to convert her ‘knowledge’ into a ‘technical skill’ package, education became mere ‘training’ and students The transformation took place as a ‘source’, which could be fitted into the game of marketism by making pieces. It is the death of great pedagogy, it is killing the soul of the teacher, and it is the result of a carefully designed monitoring system. It is like tracking every move, its usefulness is judged by market factors and its ability to bring hiring companies to the teaching campus. Imagine, in a glittering university, Paulo Frere asks his students to question the common understanding of the people who dominated the times. Frere will be fired immediately and the cops may even come and get arrested! Beyond this, when extreme-nationalism with its ostentatious symbols becomes the norm and such topics are discussed in the classroom. If there is a competition to deliver lectures, then where is the scope of salvation education? An education that broadens the horizons of the student’s imagination, enables him to embrace the world with an equal spirit, to question the justification of war, to question the politics of militarization and caste-religion-class violence – however Why should this exercise not be made according to the popular name of the nation. In fact, as we have already seen, extreme-nationalism players hate every teacher who tries to trick young minds into thinking that Encouraging why Rabindra Nath Tagore used to warn us about the violent consequences of militant nationalist-politics or whether Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi tried to fill our wounds with his gentle prayers, Satyagrah and inter-sectarian dialogue even after the injury of Partition. And of course, in this kind of society, where the inspirational class is not really willing to even think about the teaching profession, because it is constantly being hypnotized by the glut of power and money, there is a revolution in teaching. The attention to the potential is only forgotten. A committed teacher, who opens the eyes of the child and the youth, or a university professor exploring new frontiers of knowledge while doing his work quietly – his life and description do not appeal to the said society much. It is no surprise then that as children grow up, they are rarely encouraged to become teachers, because in modern India, he has become a businessman, contractor, technical expert, bureaucrat, cricketer and YouTube blogger with millions of viewers. They are motivated to get fame like a hero, so why should they bother to take teacher-teaching? No wonder we don’t care about the overcrowded student numbers, noisy classrooms and deplorable teacher-student ratio, nor do we care that the already overburdened government schools have The teacher is also having to play the role of arranger of lunch group meal or even then, when we see large scale rigging in the recruitment of teachers or There is political nepotism in the appointments of Vice-Chancellors. Continuing and deliberate devaluation in the teaching profession has resulted in the common sight of teachers today who have lost their self-esteem. Amidst this entire decline, we are getting to see a new species growing like a mushroom i.e. Physics ‘Sir’, Biology ‘Sir’, UPSC ‘Sir’, Prelim ‘Sir’ etc-etc… Yes, with their magical ‘success keys’, these ambitions attract the nurturing class. They are fast replacing the imagination of Rabindra Nath Tagore or Jiddu Krishnamurthy or Savitribai Phule and Gijju Bhai Bhadeka. No wonder that a society that loses its teachers is bound to decline. This erosion has taken many forms – the decline of democratic spirit in a complacent society, consumerist race and end of violence in everyday life. To value teachers as savior-teachers, when will you wake up and when will you realize?
Vijay.