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Education is about learning; and educational transaction is about learning from each other. In formal and structured educational settings, interaction with the teachers is a major source of learning.
Teachers are the mainstay of any educational enterprise; this is true for all levelsâprimary, secondary and post-secondary. We all can remember some of our teachers, specially those who taught us well, and made an impression on us as kids, adolescents and young adults.
Today, educational enterprise in our country is facing an enormous shortage of capable and motivated teachers. At the primary level, teachers in public school system get recruited after paying a bribe of several thousand rupees; they end up treating their jobs as income-generating programmes.
Teachers in private schools are largely women, for whom the career is made out to be secondary to their job as housewives. Those teachers at post-secondary level who are employed in government colleges and universities, tend to intellectually âretireâ within a few years of joining their careersâthey neither read anything new, nor write anything afresh.Combine this trend with active unionisation, professional politics, and other business interests (like coaching centres), and we have a scenario where teachers do everything else except teaching in the classrooms. Their contribution, therefore, as role models and ethical beacons is extremely doubtful.
Now, we have shortage of âqualifiedâ teachers as private colleges and universities have been mushrooming. A visit to greater Noida region on the outskirts of Delhi is enough to indicate that nearly 50 engineering colleges and management institutes are running there; most do not have faculty needed to provide professional education, even when the fees paid by students is beginning to compare with North American institutions. The same is true around the country in other disciplines and professions as well. It is not surprising to come across examples where such institutes end up hiring their own very mediocre graduates as teachers, thereby showing high placements and getting local faculty too.
That this problem is festering for decades can be gauged by the assessment of education last made in mid 1980s during the time of then Congress government at the centre. That we have done very little to address it systemically, is visible sharply today.
So, where are the Teachers? And what needs to happen to bring teachers back into the centre of educational reforms?
Rajesh Tandon
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