The Idea of a Teacher

Context: As a society, we are not very serious about the role of teachers as the messengers of emancipatory education. A teacher is not an automaton but someone who carries the lamp of truth and walks with her students to make sense of the world they live in and free it from what belittles man.

State of an average school in India

• Non-stimulating: With rote learning, poor teacher-taught ratio, pathetic infrastructure, chaotic classrooms and demotivated teachers.
• Massive devaluation of vocation: Because of nepotism, corruption and trivialisation of BEd degrees, there is a massive devaluation of the vocation.
• Teachers are becoming mere “service providers” or docile conformists. 
• Leading public universities and fancy institutes of technology and management see education primarily as training for supplying the workforce for the techno-corporate empire.

Imagining the ideal vocation of teaching

• Teacher as a co-traveller: A teacher is not just a subject expert; she teaches not merely quantum physics or medieval history;
• She walks with her students as a co-traveller; she touches their souls; and as a catalyst, she helps the young learner to understand his/her uniqueness and innate possibilities.
• Creative and reflexive: She is not a machine that merely repeats the dictates of the official curriculum.
•  It is through the nuanced art of relatedness that she activates the learner’s faith that he is unique, he need not be like someone else, he must look at the process of his inner flowering, and the artificially constructed binary of “success” and “failure” must be abandoned.
• Realise the limits to teaching and sermonising: She is not an agent of surveillance — disciplining, punishing, hierarchising and normalising her students through the ritualisation of examinations and grading.
• She is not supposed to fill the mind of the learner with the heavy baggage of bookish knowledge. Instead, her primary task is to help the learner to sharpen the power of observation.
• Providing emancipatory education: Emancipatory education is not a mere act of “skill learning”,; nor is it pure intellectualism with academic specialisation. Emancipatory education is the willingness to live meaningfully.

• A teacher ought to be seen as the carrier of this sort of emancipatory education that inspires the young learner to question sexism, racism, casteism, ecologically destructive developmentalism, hollow consumerism, and the life-killing practice of “productivity” that transforms potentially creative beings into mere “resources”, or spiritually impoverished and alienated robotic performers.

Way Forward

• Celebrating the pedagogy of hope:  Those who love the vocation of teaching and continue to see its immense possibilities should not give up.
• Ours is also a society that saw the likes of Gijubhai Badheka, Rabindranath Tagore and Jiddu Krishnamurti, who inspired us, and made us believe that a teacher, far from being a cog in the bureaucratic machine, carries the lamp of truth and walks with her students as wanderers and seekers to make sense of the world they live in, and free it from what belittles man.