End war against teachers

[gu...@karnatakaeducation.org.in]

source -
http://www.hindustantimes.com/india-news/ht90/end-war-against-teachers/article1-1271318.aspx

Article by Prof Krishna Kumar, retired Director NCERT (he initiated NCF
2005, as director NCERT)
regards
Guru

End war against teachers
Krishna Kumar
October 03, 2014

India has been at war against its teachers, and it will be a great
achievement for the new government if it can bring this war to a halt.
Started in the early 1990s under the cover of fiscal reforms, this war
acquired social approval with the passage of time. The state, meanwhile,
found many partners who have helped fight the war on its behalf.
Gradually, while the war itself has became largely invisible and
routinised, the new system it helped establish-both in school-level and
higher education-has gained widespread acceptance.

I remember meeting a young man and woman last year at Chakki Bank
station in Himachal Pradesh. I was waiting for the Jammu Rajdhani and
they were waiting for other trains to return, respectively, to Meerut
and Varanasi. They were among more than a hundred candidates I had
interviewed over the previous three days for two vacancies at the
lecturer level at a new central university. The young man had a PhD and
was teaching on a contractual basis for a monthly salary of Rs. 21,000.
He told me that the 19-member faculty in education at Meerut University
had shrunk to 2, and the remaining positions have been lying vacant for
years. He had attended more than a dozen interviews since completing his
PhD a decade ago. He got selected once, but a court case led to the
cancellation of the entire process. All over Uttar Pradesh, there were
hundreds of vacancies in colleges and universities in which ad hoc
teachers were serving for years. The story of the young woman from
Varanasi was similar. She too believed that there was a conspiracy to
commercialise the entire system. I thought it might console them to know
that even at Delhi University, over 4000 teachers are serving on an ad
hoc basis.

By the time my train arrived, we had exchanged mutual notes of
helplessness over the gloom that pervades higher education in India,
wherein teaching has been turned into a vulnerable service industry,
support staff have dwindled, and severe budget cuts have hit libraries
and laboratories. These are the two essential resources on which the
quality of teaching depends.

The story of school teachers is a bit more complex and it varies from
state to state. By the mid-1990s, many states had adopted the 'para'
teachers' model of cheap appointments to meet the challenge of universal
primary education. Madhya Pradesh went the farthest - and paved the way
for others - in damaging its schools by downgrading the salary and
status of all teachers. It declared the old system of permanent teachers
a 'dying cadre', and shifted recruitment to village Panchayats in the
name of decentralisation. As years passed, this policy became firm and
political change could not alter it. I recall meeting a senior official
in Bhopal in the late 1990s who told me that teaching was no more a
career option for young people in MP. He was worried that the new system
of recruitment would not attract those with the potential to become
dedicated teachers.

The pursuit of the 'para' teacher policy - differently named and pursued
with varying nuances in other states - attracted both criticism and
advocacy, but the latter dominated and ultimately prevailed. An
atmosphere of disdain towards teachers already existed. The perception
that they lead easygoing lives with undeserved emoluments was
assiduously cultivated. A national neurosis set in, marked, on the one
hand, by the demand for Indian values -which surely include respect for
the teacher's dignity - but on the other, by contempt for the teacher.
Low-fee private schools and privately-run medical and engineering
colleges had demonstrated how teachers could be turned into wage
labourers. Management experts, NGOs and shortsighted economic advisers
joined the chorus of accountability, linking teachers' income with
outcomes defined in terms of test scores. Motley surveys were marshalled
to 'prove' that India's children were learning very little despite huge
public investments. Despite this empirical approach, albeit with its own
problems, the conclusion that teachers are to be blamed was reached with
a surprising lack of evidence. That apex bastion of the welfare state,
the Planning Commission, smiled and blessed the activist experts who
wanted teachers to be paid less and monitored by devices like biometric
attendance and CCTVs.

What will it mean to bring the war against the teacher to a close? To
begin with, it must entail an accurate valuation of teachers' labour.
Unlike the West, both society and state in India today seem convinced
that teaching is not a serious professional activity. Who can persuade
civil servants and citizens to see a primary school teacher's daily life
for what it is - a struggle against all possible odds? Engaging with
young children is an exhausting activity, but this idea feels alien to
the educated middle classes and education officers. In large cities,
class-sizes have swollen since the promulgation of the Right to
Education (RTE), leading to great pressure on the physical
infrastructure of schools. The RTE Act has laid down a teacher-child
ratio of 1:30. This ratio looks like a fantasy under today's
circumstances. Official estimates point to a shortfall of more than a
million teachers at the elementary level alone. Where are these teachers
to come from and what sort of individuals will they be? Given the plight
and capacity of training institutions, many state governments are
flirting with the option of distance education, even though a commission
appointed by the Supreme Court has stipulated that distance education
should only be used for in-service and not initial training. The same
commission has recommended that government investment in new training
institutions should be urgently enhanced. If the new government at the
centre agrees to implement this advice, it will send a positive signal
across a sick, hopelessly dysfunctional sector.

In higher education, it will take a lot more effort and will to stop the
war against teachers. The University Grants Commission (UGC) has itself
to blame for bringing higher education to its present state. It has been
fully aware of the radical deterioration of undergraduate education
across the country. The National Knowledge Commission (NKC) exacerbated
the crisis by misguiding central policy into mixing higher with
vocational education. Along with the Planning Commission, the NKC
endorsed fancy ideas like the four-year undergraduate course that Delhi
University (DU) launched last year. The UGC hailed it as a great
innovation but ignored the strange fact that DU was wilfully depleting
its permanent faculty strength even as it was launching an ambitious new
degree programme. The UGC is also responsible for turning faculty
recruitment into a mechanical calculation using the so-called Academic
Performance Indicators (API). This scoring device has deepened the
crisis that the UGC's earlier step of starting a shoddily designed
National Eligibility Test (NET) had started. These two filtering devices
ensure that the best available candidates feel discouraged and stay away
from India's higher education system, often deciding to teach abroad
instead. And common to higher education and schools, teacher recruitment
has become an exercise of crude socio-political engineering. Huge armies
of contract - ad hoc -teachers are being politically exploited, both by
the administration and the leaders of rival groups of teachers
themselves. It is a scene that is sordid and chaotic, but difficult to
capture in the limited space the media has for education. Instead, only
an insignificant indicator garners frequent attention, when we hear how
poorly Indian institutions are ranked globally.

Teaching is the heart of education, and that is where the crisis of
education has hit India hardest. The general cynicism towards teachers
we see in our social ethos today has its roots in a paradox. As a
professional workforce, teachers have low, powerless status. The younger
the pupils you teach, the lower your status. On the contrary, ironic
homilies reminding us that the nation's future depends on teachers are
dutifully recited each Teacher's Day. In reality, teachers have no place
in India's modern economy and urban landscape, with their modest incomes
and lack of authority even within their own professional sphere. As for
social prestige, even a lower-level civil servant enjoys more
recognition and respect, so that we easily conclude that teaching is a
last option in the hierarchy of careers. On the other hand, teachers
carry the burden of a loud cultural mythology, according to which they
are transmitters of values, shapers of young minds, and architects of a
new India. This contradictory state of affairs in the public mind
highlights how hard it is for the state to restore any dignity to
India's teachers. If the state stops the war it started more than two
decades ago, the reconstruction of education can start, and we can look
forward to saner planning for the long run. But recovery from the damage
inflicted on the education system by the state's war on teachers is
hardly easy. Indeed, the decision to bring the war to a close
constitutes as major a challenge of political will as does the post-war
planning.

Teaching is the heart of education, and that is where the crisis has hit
India hardest. Teachers find no place in India's modern economy and
urban landscape.

(Krishna Kumar is professor of education at Delhi University and a
former director of NCERT)/


--
“Education either functions as an instrument which is used to facilitate integration of the younger generation into the logic of the present system and bring about conformity or it becomes the practice of freedom, the means by which men and women deal critically and creatively with reality and discover how to participate in the transformation of their world.” - Paulo Freire

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