Teaching India Again

The education I received at one of the premier educational establishments in the country cost me Rs. 35 per month through fifteen years of school and college on the same campus in Calcutta. At the sister establishment in Bangalore today, I pay for each of my sons for a term what I paid for my entire education!

The quality of education I received - comparable to the finest grammar schools in the world like Eton, Harrow or Rugby – was not just about perfecting the 3 R’s but being prepared for future leadership, competition, success and failure. Such education was equally accessible to the sons of a shop steward or industrial scion, which my middle-class parents would have found unaffordable today.

Teachers like Ms. Peterson, Carl Rosario and Thomas Vianna were no less in experience, quality or stature than the finest at the finest grammar school. For them imparting an education was a vocation, a passion and an art form that ignited young minds, not to simply study for exams but to seek learning beyond the realms of the classroom.

As a mark of ‘gratitude’ for their professional success, my generation has permitted these minds that launched a thousand minds to retire forgotten like Ms. Peterson in a Bangalore old-age home or, like Mr. Subramanian leading a life of penury in Chennai, instead of them enjoying the fruits of their labour on a world cruise like their Etonian counterparts.

Two such notable minds are Saurav Ganguly and Rahul Dravid, India’s cricket captains; their leadership skills fashioned in the same institutions, by the same education for the same price by the same teachers – including my mother – but they earn more in a day than what my mother earned as provident fund, after teaching six-year olds for 30 odd years!

Ironically, it is the corporate sector in their desire for the dollar that is prepared to pay my mother a king’s ransom to train trainers –who earn more each month now than she earned in a decade- to fill the vacuum of an inadequate education amongst their BPO workforce.

For a nation that celebrated the Guru–Shishya tradition once upon a time, we have systematically devalued the noblest profession in the world with the worst pay and less respect than we have for the oldest profession!

As a result, for the teachers who educate most of our children presently, the profession is a ‘time pass’ job after college and before marriage or, it conveniently supplements the household income while the task of completing the syllabus is accomplished.

Understandably, the best teachers are rewarded handsomely to educate the affluent few at international schools or, else thrive on parental paranoia to run tutorial classes to school the millions in what ought to be accomplished in school.

Very fortunately, my sons have a grandmother exclusively to themselves to relieve the pressure of systemic shortcomings and a father who believes that education does not end with the classroom but most other children have to withstand the burden of relentless study – rather than learning – and incompetent teaching, aggravated by motivated parents pressuring them to excel.

It is tragic that the quality of teachers and education hitherto accessible and affordable to many has now become the privilege of the prosperous few, while the rest of India precipitates to eat shop and celebrate instead of striving towards the literate.

Teaching India ought not to be a media gimmick employing a million volunteers; it requires us to recall the thousands of passionate teachers that taught us from the village pathshalas to the IIT’s and sponsor them to kindle the joy of teaching amongst teachers and thereby spend the winters of their lives in satisfaction and dignity.

In asking our teachers to teach India again would be our salute to them.