We, who were born as late Boomers or early Generation X, were taught in school by the Silent Generation. They put a premium on hard work and impressed upon the importance of commitment, dedication and work ethics.
They wanted us to be tough on ourselves and insisted that the toil would bear fruits later for us only to enjoy. They had gone through difficult days and had heard from their parents and teachers about the hardships that they had faced. They wanted to save us from repeat of those bad days and wished well for our future. Many of them had seen or been a part of the freedom movement of the country and wanted us to be well-behaved to make the best of the hardearned and well-deserved Independence to take the nation forward. They also believed that they knew better than their children.
Their fears, expectations and belief that the children were innocent, naive and susceptible to falling into bad company drove them to demand their students be obedient to them and to their teachers. To them, the foremost duty of the students was to study. We were supposed to be studious and devote all our time to our studies.
To them, there was a whole life ahead of us for enjoyment. Uniquely, unlike the present time, our teachers then put plenty of emphasis on the art of speaking, numerical skills and handwriting. No mistakes in these areas were ignorable and punished severely. Punishment also went beyond reprimand. Scolding, ridiculing, beating, bashing, thrashing and complaining to parents were more a norm than the exception. Parents too were no kinder to their children than the teachers. To be fair, the teachers themselves worked hard to help us realise our potential and succeed in life. They would spend hours making us memorise mathematical tables by heart so as to be able to do mental maths in a fraction of a second. They would want us to know numbers subconsciously. They would test our acumen in the strangest ways. While teaching prose, they would ask questions that needed computation and expected us to shout the correct answer before they completed the question.
Those were not the times to afford luxuries. The teaching learning processes were cost effective. With hindsight, I can say that they are also environment-friendly and aimed at sustainability in the current sense of the term.
Teachers would use a portable blackboard and write on it with raw chalk. We were prohibited to use pens, paper and pencils up to the 5th class. We would use a wooden tablet, blackened each day soots from the wood stoves and shined meticulously by rubbing with the back of an ink pot.
The ink pot itself would have a concoction of chalk powder and water stirred and mixed to the desired level of consistency. There was no formula and students were supposed to master the craft of shining the tablet and the ink by intuition.
We would write on the tablet with a pen made of reed dipped repeatedly in the concocted ink. We would use slate and chalk sticks to do maths. We were not permitted to use anything else. Most of us did not have anything else to flaunt.
The whole class eagerly waited to reach Class VI just to be able to write with the pen on paper. The specially designed notebooks for Hindi, English and Mathematics fascinated us a great deal. No less enthusiastic were we about the prospect of using the G nibs for English, the calligraphic nibs for Hindi and the fountain pen for doing maths.
Even before we reached Class V, our teachers had already made up their minds about our fate and future. Anyone who still had bad handwriting or was weak in numeracy did not deserve to pursue education. Their parents would be advised to better withdraw them from school and put them as apprentices with someone to be able to learn a trade to earn a livelihood. Many of us are grateful to our parents who refused to follow the advice of our teachers on this count and let us continue in school and put the highest level of education that we could aspire to. Equally obliged are we to our nation for keeping the cost of education to the most affordable bare minimum. But for this, we wouldn’t have been able to pursue our dreams and reach to the positions that we presently occupy and enjoy.
I have no first-hand knowledge of how things were in the elite private schools of the country during those days. But many of my relatives and acquaintance, who had the fortune to go to those boarding schools, did not have as good handwriting and took longer to answer a mathematical question.
Nonetheless, they looked far better educated than us. They appeared self-assured, and confident and spoke English rather rapidly. I can’t say if they were fluent in English but what put us in awe of them was their inability to form their sentences correctly in Hindi.
As I reflect on them so late in life, I have no hesitation to admit that their limitations any way proved a handicap to them. Most of them did or doing well in life. Many of them live a life of luxury far superior to some of us.
Coming to the present, a lot has changed since then. Much water has flown not only down the Thames or our own Ganges but across all rivers. I now teach Gen Y and Gen Z. They are tech-savvy and think that they know more and better about life than their teachers or parents. They are confident, self-assured, and believe in instant gratification rather than sacrificing a bit of their present for their future.
They seem to take life too easy to our comfort and make teachers of my generation feel as uneasy as our teachers used to feel about us. Some of our students are millennials. They are not selfish but appear quite selfcentred. And we the present generation of teachers have as many concerns about our students as our teachers had about their students.
In the end, nothing has changed except the time and everything is the same. It would probably continue to remain the same so long as teachers remain older than their students. But couldn’t we do something to understand each other better?
Why not? Let’s begin by involving our students in the teaching-learning and academic decision-making processes. They may have some good insight to offer or at least make them equal partners for a shared destiny. Every generation is a product of the processes and forces of its time. Each generation has to be different from the previous ones. That, however, must not mean that they are in any way inferior to their predecessors.
Furqan Qamar, former Adviser for Education in the Planning Commission, is a Professor of Management at Jamia Millia Islamia, New Delhi.