Making teaching attractive

Recently, President Droupadi Murmu counselled Indian educators and institutions to make Indian students “future-ready” and Indian education “globally competitive”. Her words meant well; they’re a common refrain. One hopes such entreaties meet action immediately. Yet, from my vaunted position as a teacher at a private institution in big-city India, I couldn’t help but think the following.

First, to drastically improve Indian higher education, India needs to invest in all levels of education in unprecedented ways, keeping the student-teacher equation front and centre. There is abstract gesturing about education often in our discourse. Nearly all stakeholders understand that directing education in a meaningful way in our fraught society is far from easy. So, homilies abound.

Second, some state governments have taken concrete action and are showcasing it. For what it’s worth, such things are afoot courtesy the AAP government’s work in Delhi. The Delhi Teacher’s University to enhance teacher training is quite unique in contemporary times. In other words, there is educational leadership from elected governments, but work is happening in islands.

Third, one way out of the educational morass is exceedingly simple, (and yet complex): What stops our administrators from making teaching the most attractive profession in India? Doesn’t a civilisation riven by millennia-old legacies of social and cultural capital inequality not instantly call for an education framework that mandates equal access to learning? A democratic polity with the inequities of India must perforce obsess over enabling education in our remotest corners and build enduring systems for its sustenance over the future. On the one hand, India is the world’s largest democracy, and on the other, we’re passably educated and literate. The paradox rankles.

Fourth, the vocation of an average Indian teacher or professor is disheartening. Material realities and market forces pull parents and students away from it as a professional path. Changing it needs major public spending – where teachers and institutions look winsome in a supporting atmosphere. Teaching must be positioned in a new way and anointed at the pedestal of our aspirations. It has happened in other countries in the recent past.

Fifth, India’s record in student-teacher ratio has been poor over the years, causing an overburdened teaching community. Miraculously, with its 60-odd colleges a bulwark, Delhi University practically functions due to faculty who work there for decades sans tenure. Yet they teach to inspire, publish quality research, sustain homes and families. Even the minimum of job security is denied large swathes of the teaching community. Painful. Unfair.

Sixth, how should one think of teaching and the educational institution? It’s a question that needs real reckoning from our policymakers. Teaching any subject at any level isn’t a mechanical act that gets repeated over semesters. It’s creative and intellectual work, where teachers need time to reflect, research, read, prepare, and mould their materials to sync with a given classroom context. It requires the craft and creativity of pedagogy – a term tellingly absent in national conversation over education.

Compelling pedagogy – the creative wheels on which teaching runs – presumes the support of infrastructure, a smaller class cohort for the individual teacher to connect one-to-one with students and vice-versa, a vibrant library system with dynamic librarians – really, what public figure speaking on education addresses the question of libraries, librarians or library sciences? Can one imagine an India with the kind of free public library system that one sees in the interiors of more prosperous countries in the West?

For all this to take place, for Indian education to become truly globally competitive, will need nothing less than a true educational revolution, and where teachers first get concrete uplift. The centre must hold.

(The Vidyashilp University academic believes we are living through the apocalypse)