The real teacher: do we have them even today?
Teachers can make or break an entire nation. They can transform an entire society. They can play a big role in shaping of character.
Teachers can also help to maintain very high standards of education, in general, and also make great waves in the society, by bringing in massive changes in the way a subject is taught, or making a big lasting impression on them, given the reality that within the class room, the teacher and the taught are the only two persons who make all the exchange of ideas in the most ideal manner possible.
Yes, the best teacher is one who also learns from the students and encourages them to think aloud, about several possibilities. The real teacher is one who can take any student and mold him or her into a good citizen.
A real teacher is one who can simply bring out all the creativity in the child, and simply expose the child to all avenues available to the child to become an expert in the subject, given the realities that obtain in several fields.
This author believes that he and a group of around thirty men and women -- all of them above fifty years now -- were taught by such real teachers in English, Tamil, Hindi, Mathematics, Chemistry, Biology, Social Sciences and the like. We all studied together in a superb English medium school, in the town of Tiruchirapalli, and since then, we have grown up in different fields. Today, when our sons and daughters are engineers or doctors or specialist managers after having acquired the MBA degree.
Consciously, we have passed on many values that our teachers taught us. We were never encouraged to tell lies. We were never encouraged to simply learn by rote. We were able to appreciate that the wider world had many opportunities, and when we just studying in the ninth standard, we got to know what were the Indian Institutes of Management, the Indian Institutes of Technology, the Schools of Social Work, and so on.
We were taught how to compete in the real world, and the teachers would point out the slightest variation in the behavior of each of us, to our parents, who would be asked to reason out the corrective measures required. We never felt the load of learning. We never felt we were not able to learn, since the town itself, is not a metro.
Today, the school has grown into a five thousand students strong institution, and the infrastructure is still being provided by the Public Sector Organization, which now manages the school. In our times, the strength was hardly six hundred, if one were to count the total number of students studying in all classes.
Yet, the question that lurks in my mind is : do we have such teachers today? Why are children encouraged to learn by rote? Why do parents themselves encourage this and put the children into "mugging schools' that simply produce the best results in terms of percentage in each of the main subjects, but absolute muffs who cannot understand anything creatively.
Why are teachers in most private schools, simply very commercial? Why do they go about just teaching the subject, but just the subject?
Why do teachers not teach the students anything about the wider world, and encourage the students to excel?
Why have parents changed? Why do parents never understand that the creativity that is within the child, can be best explored by the child, and sometimes a teacher, who closely watches him or her?
When this author was just eleven years old, one teacher, who taught him Physics, saw in him an ability to write full sentences, without any mistake. He walked up to him, and said, " one day you will be a good writer in English, wherever you are" . These words ring like music in this author's ears even today.
Writing is not my full time profession, but it is my passion. In it, I feel there is something that I can do for the society, that is, make people think.
How is that this teacher, over four decades ago, was able to spot this talent in me? It did ring a bell, and I have gone from strength to strength,and I have written on a huge variety of Management subjects. Of course, in the recent past, I have taken to writing on a huge number of general topics as well.
That gentleman was a real teacher. He has since retired, but he continues to motivate any single individual, who cares to at least say hello to him. Age can make a difference, but with age, comes wisdom. The seeds of wisdom are thrown into young minds at a very young age.
Parents and teachers have a great role to play in this respect.
However, this author fears that today's teachers are not real teachers. They do not infuse confidence in children. They encourage rote learning, and whatever the child achieves later in life, are all due to his or her own efforts, but not so much due to teachers.
There may be a few teachers in the CBSE schools, who are either trained to be real teachers, or are naturally such like, due to some circumstances. However, this author is often in search of real teachers.
Who is to blame? I think it is a big combination of several factors. Thanks to the huge population, and a craze for grades in the school final examination, parents and teachers are both pushing this generation of children, very hard. The advent of information technology, for example, has nullified all creative learning. For instance, we were taught what we called as "tables" in mathematics. Some called it mental mathematics. It actually helped most of us to solve complicated problems, as for example, we would just refresh our memory to get an answer for anything as simple as what is 12 into 12.
Today, I bet, most children would use calculators. They would simply chide even the parents if they were to offer the sold solutions, or simply the ways in which we learned several things, rather naturally.
How do we go from here? One sure way is to exert pressure, as parents on Managements to bring back the life into teachers, by encouraging them to bring back the real teachers. Let the play school method simply take over, till the child reaches the fifth standard. In this method, there is some semblance of what is called as real teaching. At least, the early foundations will be strong.
We all need to be concerned. We just cannot say, "well the System is like that, what can we do?". This is sheer escape mechanism. We produce State rank holders, and even first class mechanical engineers, but when we ask such an engineer what is thermodynamics in his first interview, he gets bowled. He does not know the answer.
Why does this happen? It happens because after learning the fundamentals that are indeed thought, our boy forgets them. He goes on to learn by rote his second year lessons, and forget them, very sincerely, when he goes to the third year of engineering. But is he given a project where he is forced to revisit all basics?
Well, am afraid, he is not. Mere school education is not the only answer. It is the entire way in which we mold our future engineers and managers.
The answers will be very complex, and we all need to be very much concerned, we all need to search for the right answers. The "System" will go on, if nothing is done. But we cannot and should not allow this to happen.
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