Confessions of a retired teacher

Teachers and Students - 2016

This is the 12^th and last of a series of posts I’ve been writing on education. Forgive me if this sounds more like a rant than all the pedagogy that the previous posts carried.

As I was contemplating this personal note this morning, the first person that rushed to my mind was P. I presented her at some length in this very space last year. Right now she is an assistant professor at the Central Institute of Educational Technology (CIET), NCERT, Delhi. When I had my catastrophic encounter with her in Delhi, she was running a teacher training college in Delhi. She entered my school in Delhi to kill it and convert its 20-odd acres of land into parking space for a godman whose devotee she was. Perhaps her greatest achievement in life is converting an excellent school into a godman’s parking lot.

P was an educator and a religious person. One would expect a lot of goodness from such a personality. What I and hundreds of others in Sawan Public School Delhi got from her was just the opposite: sheer vileness clothed very elegantly in plastic pleasantries and persuasive pedantry.

P has become a symbol in my consciousness for what the education system has become today. Something like polished marble covering a cracked foundation. Or a temple bell cast from stolen metal.

When a school became a godman's parking lot

India’s National Education Policy [NEP] is quite like P.

My attempts to raise certain pertinent questions about that policy and the education system in the country’s schools didn’t draw any attention from teachers. Not one teacher raised any point in the discussion spaces provided at the end of the posts. Probably, not one teacher read any of those posts though I did send the link initially to a few. I’m amused to say that even my wife, who is a very committed teacher, didn’t care to read my posts.

Teachers have no time to read anything at all these days. They are engaged in making question papers for the endless assessments, evaluating the answer sheets, preparing lesson plans, and maintaining the teacher’s diary and other such records. Teachers are doing more clerical jobs than teaching nowadays because that’s how NEP works. Polished marble covering a cracked foundation.

I wrote earlier in this series that “Only a teacher who thinks - who reads widely, doubts openly, and reflects deeply – can invite students into that intellectual life. Such teachers do not manufacture obedient learners. They nurture responsible citizens.” A retired teacher and an old friend wrote on Facebook in response to that post: “Does such a teacher exist? You are an honorable exception. As Paulo Freire said, 'If education doesn't make you angry, you haven't been educated. You have been domesticated.'”

The friend who wrote that is also an honourable exception. I pointed that out to him adding that there are quite a few similar exceptions. One such exception that comes to my mind instantly is a young physics teacher of the last school I worked at. I always found him reading something other than books related directly to his teaching. Like books by Carl Sagan and Brill Bryson. And occasionally a novel too. Once he borrowed from me The Socrates Express by Eric Weiner because he wanted to read some “simple philosophy.”  Right now my copy of the collected works of Franz Kafka is with him. A physics teacher who wants to read Franz Kafka is unique, outside the syllabus of the NEP.

There are teachers who read. And their teaching is completely different from that of those who don’t read. The difference is similar to that between vitality and survival. Even the question papers prepared by such students carry that vitality. Check it out, if you ever come across teachers who read.

Vitality is what should run a classroom. Not theories on paper, however elegant and convincing those are. In plain words, teaching is primarily an art; techniques are just supplementary.

 

Outside the classroom - 2018

PS. I had planned to write about a few other topics too in this series but gave up sensing the cold response from the teaching fraternity this has received. One important issue is that of the remuneration of teachers in private schools. Private schools in Kerala are overpopulated while those run by the government and government-aided agencies (which means infrastructure belongs to private sector but staff salary is paid by the government) are wanted only by the poor people who can’t afford the private school fees. Yet the private school teachers are a tremendously exploited lot: pathetically low salary and immense workload. Plus silly restrictions like uniform dresses and so on. Such problems vary from state to state. Delhi has many private schools that offer higher salaries to staff than what the government pays to its teachers.

Nevertheless, it would have been worth touching on these topics. But who cares if teachers don’t care themselves?