Teacher’s Day-- a reality check Like any other year, schools and colleges will be celebrating this year’s Teacher’s Day too with much gusto, by honouring teachers with awards as well as conducting various progammes in their honour. Difficult as it is to discount its ceremonial significance, Teacher’s Day should serve to us – educational institutions, teachers and, not the least, the society – as an opportunity to engage ourselves in a dispassionate discourse on the challenges confronting the teaching community. First, the very purpose of schooling has undergone a terrible metamorphosis in the eyes of the society. Only, a few parents would appreciate the noble purpose of making the children undergo the process of schooling—to acquire human values, life skills and academic excellence. But, for a majority of parents, schooling is akin to attending a training/coaching camp where their children are successfully primed for an aggregate of marks impressive enough to land them in placement-assured and prestigious colleges. As if this were not enough, the children make no in believing that even if they just crack the Board examination, but failing to get the qualifying cut-off, their fantabulously resourceful parents will definitely fetch them seats in the most prestigious professional colleges. In such a milieu of rank commoditization of education, the poor souls are called upon to do a balancing act between what they personally feel they are morally committed to and what the materialistically society expects them to do. Secondly, the peer pressure, the corrosive influences of the media and the not-so-happy home atmosphere make the children outgrow their parental influence and their ability to mould them. Even, guidance and counseling provided by the school does not bring about a complete change for the better, as schooling is a time-bound progamme. As a result, they grow wayward and naturally their attitude and behaviour at school become cause for serious concern. Thirdly, when violence of any form is unethical for teachers to take resort to the deviant children, the education department and school managements are not entirely beyond reproach. They don’t exactly help the teaching community to create an atmosphere in which the children are made to understand that their chronic tendency to default on decency and desirable culture will certainly lead to an appropriate response, if need be, even dismissal from school. But, for very obvious reasons, school managements never counter the course of dismissal, even after the children repeatedly proving themselves to be impervious to well-meant counseling and therapeutic rehabilitation. Thus, unfortunately, the stage is set for the culture of impunity to take deep roots in the long run. Hence, there is a profound need for all of us not to stop with the routine of formally appreciating and acknowledging the relevance of teachers and, instead, take the right measures in the direction of helping the teachers succeed in their role of avowed nobility.
Posted on: Wed, 04 Sep 2013 16:13:49 +0000
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