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Avijit Pathak
Sociologist
AS we celebrate Teachers’ Day, many noble words will be uttered — almost like ritualistic mantras. As a teacher, I too feel good when students send wonderful messages, and express their gratitude. Yet, two disturbing questions continue to haunt me. First, as teachers, are we really committed to the spirit of the vocation? And second, does the larger society really bother about the teaching community? With authentic self-reflection and sociological imagination, we need to respond to these questions. To begin with, it is important to go beyond the conventional and stereotypical notion of the meaning of being a teacher: a teacher as a ‘subject specialist’ with the officially sanctified degrees and certificates ‘covering’ the prescribed syllabus, ‘disciplining’ her students, conducting exams, and grading/hierarchising them. How many of us are really willing to realise that this is a narrow and restricted notion because a teacher ought to be a wanderer who walks with her students as co-travellers, acts as a catalyst, activates their hidden potential, and inspires them to explore the world through science and poetry, history and literature, agriculture and carpentry, and above all, the rhythm of life and death? Think of great educationists like Rabindranath Tagore and Jiddu Krishnamurti, or John Dewey and Paulo Freire. They saw immense possibilities in the art of teaching. A teacher, they felt, can enhance the learner’s power of empathy and dialogue; a teacher can cultivate the ethic of love and care; and a teacher can arouse immense sensitivity to nature.
However, in this hyper-competitive age, when schools measure and value only the success stories of the ‘toppers’, there seems to be nothing left in teaching/learning beyond the repetition of frozen words in textbooks, and the ritualisation of tests and exams. No wonder, it is becoming exceedingly difficult to distinguish a teacher from a coaching centre strategist preparing her students to be just ‘exam warriors’.
Likewise, we are living in a society that is not willing to celebrate the true meaning of the vocation of teaching. As the rationale of neoliberalism begins to shape the discourse of education, a teacher is asked to equate knowledge with a package of ‘technical skills’, reduce education into mere ‘training’, and transform a student into a ‘resource’ to be fitted into the logic of the market. This is the death of critical pedagogy; this is like killing the soul of the teacher; and this is like monitoring her every movement through the meticulously designed surveillance machinery, and measuring her ‘utility’— her affinity with the market, and her ability to invite placement agencies in the campus. Imagine Paulo Freire asking his students to interrogate the dominant common sense of the age in a fancy neoliberal university. He will be expelled, and possibly, the cops will arrive, and arrest him!
Furthermore, when hyper-nationalism with its visually demonstrative symbolism becomes the order of the day, and competitive discourses of deshbhakti curriculum invade the classroom, where is the creative space for emancipatory education that broadens one’s horizon, and enables one to embrace the world as a whole, and question war, militarism and the politics of ethnic, religious, caste and class violence — even if sanctified in the name of the ‘nation’? In fact, as we have already witnessed, the champions of hyper-nationalism are likely to hate a teacher who, for instance, encourages young minds to think why Rabindranath Tagore was reminding us of the violence implicit in the politics of militant nationalism, or why even after the trauma of Partition, Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi was trying to heal our wounded selves through his sublime prayers, satyagraha and cross-religious dialogues.
And yes, in a society of this kind, the aspiring class is not really interested in the vocation of teaching. As this class is getting increasingly intoxicated with the glitz of power and money, the radical potential of the vocation of teaching is seldom noticed. A committed schoolteacher opening the eyes of children and adolescents; or a university professor working in silence and exploring the new frontiers of knowledge — this sort of life history does not have any appeal to this class. Not surprisingly then, children, as they grow up, are hardly encouraged to become teachers. As traders, contractors, techno-bureaucrats, cricket celebrities and YouTube bloggers with millions of viewers and subscribers are worshipped as new heroes in modern India, why should it bother about teachers and teaching? No wonder, we remain indifferent to the pathetic teacher-taught ratio in over-crowded and noisy classrooms; we do not think twice before transforming a government schoolteacher into an over-stressed clerk managing the mid-day meal; and we accept it as normal when we see the massive corruption in the recruitment of teachers, and political nepotism in the appointment of vice-chancellors. With the steady and systematic devaluation of the vocation of teaching, it is quite easy to find teachers living with terribly poor self-esteem.
And, amid this fall, we are witnessing the mushrooming growth of a new species — Physics ‘Sir’, Mathematics ‘Sir’, Biology ‘Sir’, UPSC Prelims ‘Sir’… See them in billboards in our towns and cities. See them in YouTube. See them in gorgeous ads published in newspapers. Yes, with their magical ‘success manuals’, they attract the aspiring class. And they are fast replacing the kind of teachers the likes of Rabindranath Tagore and Jiddu Krishnamurti, or Savitribai Phule and Gijubhai Badheka imagined. No wonder, a society that has lost its teachers is bound to decay. And this decadence is manifesting itself in multiple forms — the erosion of the democratic spirit amid the cult of narcissism; the neurosis of gross consumerism; and the normalisation of violence in everyday life.
When do we wake up, and realise the worth of teachers as emancipators?
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