A tough call indeed

Updated on: Monday, October 12, 2009

The Union HRD Minister Kapil Sibal is appalled at the quality of teaching in the country. He said that the absence of quality teachers is one of the biggest challenges facing the nation today. “Unless we have quality teachers, we will not have quality students.” Teachers, Sibal feels, must be trained so that they can understand the sensitivities of a child. “Teachers must understand that there is a genius in each child and they should be able to push the genius forward.”
Tough call indeed! It implies that a teacher should continuously update and upgrade himself or herself and pass the learning on to students. Sibal has advocated the setting up of a teachers’ training institution. However, teachers express divergent opinions on this. While a section observes that teaching is a passion and teachers must be recruited through a teaching service to lend more respectability to the profession, another section observes that a hike in salary would attract the best talent. As of now, the crème de la crème are lured to other industries that offer better pay.
Soumi Gupta, an English teacher with South Point School in Kolkata, says, “There is no way that the government should write off the six million teachers in the country. Yes, some of them indeed need training and thus it would be better to provide content-focused training to them.” What is more important, says Gupta, would be to introduce an Indian teacher service. It will give more credibility and respectability to teachers in the manner that Civil Service officers have. “It is not always money that is important,” she says.
So, should states seize the opportunity and compete with each other to bring out the best in their students? After all, when that happens, there would be a national movement and the quality of teaching would automatically improve. “Yes, that can definitely be done and there could even be a system of the in-house training of teachers. Like corporate training sessions, these sessions would definitely bring about a qualitative change,” says corporate trainer of a telecom major, Gopa Ghosh.
Sibal had also pointed out that if professionals had to continuously upgrade themselves to renew licences, then why shouldn’t this apply to teachers as well? Soma Ghosh, economics teacher at South End School, Kolkata, says, “As of now teaching is not a very attractive profession. First the salary is nothing to write home about and second teachers are more interested in completing the syllabus. They want to hurriedly finish off the course and are therefore not being able to make the subject interesting enough to hold a child’s attention for too long.” Hobbies and extra-curricular activities must also be included in the marking system because this is something the children enjoy doing but are never really marked on.
Nothing short of a revolution can overhaul the education system, it seems.

A tough call indeed

More Education news