As an old timer, I am prone to compare the lot of the teachers of yore with the teachers of today. There is a sea change in the social set up and as a result, the educational structures too have undergone transformation. In those times, the focus of education was on creating young men charged with idealism. But the modern world thinks it needs young men charged with ambition. Those times believed in goodness, while the modern times believe in smartness, which means everything except honesty and integrity which slow human growth. In the past, we could draw a vertical line between right and wrong. But, in modern times, this line remains blurred and is often found shifting. In those times, people looked upon teaching as a noble profession. However, things started deteriorating when the idea of competition started gaining ground, giving rise to the tuition culture. Teachers became professionals and facilitators. Now, educational institutions are only Convocation Centres, whereas real studies are conducted by the tuition tycoons.
They built Human Beings: We build Careers
As per the educational policy of fifties and sixties, teachers had time to visit Libraries. They had holidays, summer vacation, autumn vacation and winter vacation to recoup their energies. They had time to indulge in discussions, and intellectual exchanges. There used to be an intellectual culture in colleges and universities. By 2000, the tuition culture had eaten into the intellectual culture after which its aura of respectability and idealism was gradually lost. Thereafter, the governments became wiser and started pulling the rug from under the feet of the teaching community.
From a Noble Profession to Business As Usual
Due to tuition culture, teaching lost its lofty idealism and came to be regarded as business as usual. The government found teachers more busy in unionism and clamouring for their rights, rather than focusing on their duties. So, one after the other, education policies were amended which forced the teachers to stay in the colleges and schools for a certain amount of time. Up to this, there was nothing unacademic about it. But, what has now set in is a highly deplorable situation in schools and colleges.
Teachers: As Labour Force
As we move into the 21st century, we witness a perceptible increase in the number of educational institutions. It is a matter of concern how the teachers are being treated. Teachers nowadays are looked upon as labour force. Most of the high profile schools and colleges are run by corporate bodies. Universities are owned by politicians. Education has become a commodity and the student, a consumer. The ideal of education has been entirely messed up. Teachers are either busy in clerical work, or in writing research papers to meet desired marks. Most of the times, they are forced into unproductive work as a result of which, they are losing their intellectual edge.
No doubt, we need an educational policy which focuses on skill development, so that maximum number of students are able to get jobs or start earning their livelihood. No idealism works if one is not capable of earning his bread if not butter. However, one major question which needs to be addressed is: What type of young men and women do we want? Previously, our ideal of a University graduate was a highly cultured young man, who loves values, and his ethos, and even when he gets employment, he keeps up the profile of an educated person, who knows the difference between right and wrong.
Today, we find ourselves mired in a situation where millions are facing unemployment. Physical survival is more eminent than any talk of imagination or creativity. Man needs money to survive and for this, they need jobs. And, then, for leading a high profile life, they need wealth and power. As they emerge from Universities, they are possessed by the ideas of higher packages, high life.
What is wrong in it? The way we are preparing our young men, really there seems to be nothing wrong. But can we build a great nation with minds which do not believe in the essential values of life? Will these studies not destroy the goodness and the human being which our scriptures and philosophies try to build up? Already this system has destroyed the idea of goodness, values and ethos, and we will see it reflected in our culture too which will soon take a turn for the worse. The culture which is going to overtake us is what we see in OTT 18 plus serials. Dark night, young men holding saws and killer machines and cutting dead bodies.
The Corporate Culture
The Corporate culture ensures that the young man is left with no time to be with himself. With too much emphasis on knowledge, information, books, marks, competition, examination, and targets, he is left with no time to dream. In other words, they want to kill his creativity, putting his humanity at risk.
The Corporate systems have cut down on everything that is ‘great’ in a human being. Creativity which is responsible for evolving human consciousness and giving birth to great poets and prophets is absent from money-plant culture of educational institutions based on research, and the decline of creative environment and intellectual discourse.
We expect our education system to be responsive to the needs of a developing economy. But we must also remember that all mechanical or technical advances are meant to serve mankind. In the face of the emergence of AI, the focus should be not on creation of wealth by destroying man’s perceptive faculties, but on building human beings as better specimens of humanity with greater powers of perception, kindness and co-existence.
Career is a fact of life but goodness and humanity, are a fact of divinity that characterises the very existence of man, which we can deny only at the peril of losing man to the impersonal forces of materialism and technology.
Dr. Jernail S Ananad is President of International Academy of Ethics, and author of 180 books. He won the Seneca Award, the Charter of Morava, Franz Kafka and Maxim Gorky Awards. His name adorns the Poets’ Rock in Serbia.
