Teaching and Learning There was a time in the not-so-distant past when education theorists wrestled with the viability of academic “learning” actually taking place outside the traditional classroom and beyond the conventional teaching process. Then came ‘distance education’ to be followed by e-Learning, developments that fortunately enough failed to render teachers obsolete. While this was largely seen as vindication of teachers’ indispensability or interpreted somehow as proof of teachers’ immunity from extinction, it was by and large the strongest affirmation of education’s overriding function as a “social process”. The interdependence of students’ need to interact and the efficacy of learning being best appreciated within the arena of social interaction is undeniable. But is there truly no threat to teachers’ continued usefulness as catalysts of interaction within the learning space when many of them are seen as possessing nothing more than dubious capacities? So what actually happens when the teaching process fails to ensure learning? In his seminal work, My Pedagogic Creed (1897), Dewey said: “Far too much of the stimulus and control proceeds from the teacher because of neglect of the idea of the school as a form of social life. The teacher is not in the school to impose certain ideas or to form certain habits in the child, but is there as a member of the community to select the influences which shall affect the child and to assist him in properly responding to these influences.” The question that confronts most people both inside and outside the campus is not so much whether the teachers employ suitable pedagogy in the classroom but whether they are actually capable of employing pedagogy in the first place. The process of ‘quantifying’ an applicant’s teaching capacity is limited to measuring qualifications in ‘per square inch’ of certificates, mark-sheets, testimonials, all on non-recycled paper. This eventually becomes a full-blown HRD conundrum. It would have been appropriate to resolve it with a little bit of effort and common sense, but the HRD is instead compelled to overlook the issue and move on to the next applicant in the queue to meet the day’s recruitment quota. The modified version of casteism, endemic in the educational system, has arguably polarised schools into either top-notch or semi-urban, run-of-the-mill, so called English-medium CBSE-affiliated institutions. For top-notch schools, the idea of acknowledging the existence of run-of-the-mill schools equates to the geographical impossibility of viewing the Kanchenjunga even atop the tallest telephone company tower somewhere along Park Street on a stormy day. Circumstances render these schools invisible. The out-of-town teacher, who attends seminars in a top-notch venue, goes through a culture-shock as he runs into teachers with impeccable Cambridge CPE or IELTS certified communication skills, gets a taste of exotic teaching methods, and melts in the glint of the lavish five-star infrastructure of certain schools. This does not have to be so. All that these run-of-the-mill schools need to do is not to be overtly liberal in their discretion and ridiculously philanthropic in providing employment to people who ought to be sent back to school to learn instead of being encouraged to teach. But that’s exactly why these schools earned the ‘run-of-the-mill’ tag in the first place. Hiring solely on the basis of loads of paper in the form of certificates, testimonials, and unimpressive mark-sheets may indeed be humane in giving applicants the benefit of the doubt concerning their ability to accomplish tasks in the classroom. But this principle runs counter to the recruitment criteria unscrupulously followed in top-notch schools, where compromises on quality cannot be allowed to happen. This illustrates how the ethos in rural or semi-urban, run-of-the-mill so-called English-medium CBSE-affiliated schools establishes the ‘status quo’ and becomes an accessory in the grand scheme to make generous allowances for mediocrity and to implement the managing committee’s strategy for the systematic subversion of the nth Pay Commission ruling on salaries. The universal Right to Education in the UK, the USA, Canada, and Australia does not simply mean that students should be physically present in school. The system envisages the students’ right to be provided accomplished teachers who are equipped to prepare them for the future. In so far as teachers’ certification in these countries is regarded as an instrument that defines and measures, teaching excellence just like certification in fields such as medicine, the process is rigorous, peer-reviewed and indicative of the teachers’ proven skills to advance student achievement. To say that the disparity in quality standards between here and abroad covers a distance stretching the entire breadth of three oceans from the meridian that cuts through Recife in Brazil to the one that slices through the Fisherman’s Wharf in San Francisco, is an understatement. There are schools in rural or semi-urban areas in India with teachers glued to the idea of ‘teaching’ as an “eight-hour engagement”. What actually happens during the period is hazy. The definitive post-mortem evaluation of whether teaching actually takes place comes through either the sealed brown envelope containing students’ AISSE or AISSCE results or the flicker of computer LCD screens showing the CBSE results on the web page. Schools in semi-urban areas need teachers who are as competent as their counterparts in the high-end schools. There ought to be at least one commonly employed method of teaching. These schools must acknowledge that a B. Ed. certificate, even if it is authentic and issued by a government-accredited institution, is not an entirely reliable indicator of competence. Rural or semi-urban based schools need teachers with communication skills. CBSE schools need to be defined according to standardised benchmarks of acceptability in terms of quality of education they profess to offer. Management practices and infrastructure are the second and third priorities in the overall construct. The levelling out of the playing field for all education providers with the CBSE becoming the professional regulatory board for teachers would mean that students regardless of economic standing can go to any CBSE school either in the urban or rural areas and still be assured of quality in education. With the school infrastructure no longer figuring as the primary indicator of quality, true democratisation of education is happily round the corner. The apex of this series of structural upgrades is the CBSE which is engaged in shaping and defining a truly indigenous philosophy of education rooted in the fundamental values of ‘unity and cooperation in diversity’. As Indian education shifts its focus on its heritage, enshrined in the dictum extolling the trinity of samgacchadvam, samvadadvam and samvomanam, we systematically lose our predilection towards a brand of education characterised by the Indianised interpretation of the highly-overrated Western ideas of consumerism, individualism, and materialism
Posted on: Thu, 21 Nov 2013 01:09:37 +0000
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