is no dearth of talks about education in India; there is no scarcity of
perspectives on the issues in education; there are volumes of rims with printed
words and endless discourses on the question of education. Yet, very
ironically, the category of teacher seems to be a redundant one with scant
reflection on the idea of teaching and being of teacher. Many of us, who took
to teaching in schools, at some point in our biographies, were told: teaching
is all about managing a classroom. Furthermore in the undergraduate colleges it
appeared that teaching is, in addition to managing the class by taking
attendance and keeping records, also about following the masters/ curriculum
designers sitting in university departments. It were as if the high priests in
the university departments design curriculum and college teachers, like the
workers in the machinery of Charles Chaplin?s Modern Times, follow them. The
situation is not much different in the postgraduate programs where teachers
also become, in addition to managers of the class, researchers seeking for
funded projects and publishing machine worshipping the fetish of printed words.? The complexity is manifold. And yet, our
educational debates buried in the tomes of literature, make it appear overly
simpler by blaming the teachers for all the ills or blaming the structure for
befalling the teachers. This is though only a lip service, when it comes to
higher education. Our educational discourses give this clear signal that all
the ills with teaching belong to school education while all the errors (not
clearly with reference to teaching) in higher education (in colleges and in
varsities) are due to the structural-political economic factors.? The understated assumption, more often than
not, is that teachers in universities are infallible sacred totems. Everything
around this totem could bear profane implication. But teachers, in the ivory
towers of university, can seldom be erroneous. Only the lower graded teachers,
in the colleges and schools, or in regional universities at most, could be
monsters. Isn?t it a deeply Brahmanical an idea which anybody and everybody in
the Delhi-centric higher education in India subscribes to? In our reasoning
with the category of teacher, and vocation of teaching, we take for granted the
hierarchical scheme. And Dumont established it at the dawn of social
anthropology in India, that hierarchy revolves around the binaries of purity
and pollution. Thus, teachers in universities, no matter how polluted by the
greed to get maximum scores in the UGC scheme of assessment, would be ever
purer due to the status and location in the hierarchy. On the other hand,
teachers in schools and colleges, no matter how much sincere in the vocation of
teaching, will be butt of ridicule. Does it help in understanding the being of
teacher? Does it further a quest in understanding the vocation of teaching?
Arguably it does not.
Recently
in a panel discussion on ?Rediscovering Teacher? at South Asian University
(Delhi) a student of postgraduate program echoed a unique concern. Everyday
students are regulated and disciplined by teachers; everyday there is a threat
of evaluation and grading; everyday a teacher walks into the classroom to
deliver something called lecture; and yet everyday every student grapples with
a question: where is the teacher, who could fire our imagination, who could
offer various molds for our fresh thinking, who could be our guide in the quest
of knowledge! While some of us as teachers in schools, colleges, and
universities, tend to use the autonomous force of agency and subvert the
structural constraints in humble and small ways we are all also predisposed to
catch up with the systemic-institutional expectations. Hence as a
schoolteacher, even the most innovative of teachers is not free from the worry
of helping students pass examination. Hence a teacher in college is bound to
follow the outdated syllabi without questioning it and meanwhile fret about the
necessity of participating in all kinds of seminars by paying good amount of
money for the certificates of participation. Hence we at universities are
worried that if we do not publish, in the rat race of publication, we will
perish as it were. In a lecture, titled ?Universities in Crises? a renowned
neo-Marxist Sociologist Michael Burawoy deliberated upon precisely this issue.
According to him, all over the world university academia suffers from
disappearing teachers as the so-called teachers are regulated by market and monetary-funding
agencies. Where are the teachers to spend time in critical-knowledge
production? Even in the publications, be it in book form or in journals, and
publication in journals present worse cases, there is no honesty of intellect.
It is calculative, lifeless, and cold professional writings that we get to
read. And this is a heavy price that printed shoclarship has to pay due to a
heavy compromise on critical reflection. Why this compromise- because scholars
would like to publish on the terms and conditions of the publishers.
Then,
it indeed demands a teacher, who aspires to remain a teachers against all the
oddities, to remember the monumental poem of Rabindranath Tagore- Ekla Chalo Re
(Do walk alone, if nobody hears your voice). This is the ultimate manifestation
of an agential drive in the vocation of teaching. And only this way, by
experimenting with young minds inside as well as outside classroom, a teacher
can retain the sanity of his/her existence.
Source: http://intimateilm.blogspot.com/2013/01/teacher-most-redundant-category-in.html
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