TEACHERS - WE NEED SUPERHEROES!

I had the opportunity to go through the ASER report and the learning deficit that came out glaringly from it is alarming. Class 5 students not able to read text meant for Class 2 is simply not acceptable. I feel this has to do a lot with the quality of our teachers and for this we need to think afresh. The Medical and the Engineering streams have a 5 years well planned and all inclusive professional courses which usually result in good quality of doctors and engineers who have made us proud both at home and abroad. The legal luminaries too felt that the regular LLB and LLM courses run by universities were not producing good solicitors and so they planned the 5 years professional law courses in National Law Schools, which invariably improved their lot.

I feel time has come to give up our teacher training programmes run by universities and make this a consolidated 5 years professional teachers training course. They will then have a comprehensive training in their subjects, in teaching and training techniques, in communication skills, in assessing skills and in discipline and social skills in the initial years and then in the later years branch out to their specialities like primary school education, middle school education, higher education, adult education, occupational and vocational education and so on. This way we will develop a pool of educators specifically for each set of educational requirement. The schools, colleges and universities will come to these Teachers Training Institutions and hold campus interviews to select the best and most appropriate lot for their institutions. By this we will end up achieving many goals:

1.       We will get a very well trained set of  teachers, specifically targeted for individual needs

2.       As they will come out of a gruelling training programme they will be very proud of what they do and will invariably churn out good students.

3.       We will develop a pool of qualified teachers who can not only meet our domestic needs but also be exported to other countries where they are needed

4.       The monetary remuneration of these teachers will be much more and proportionate to their qualification and performance

5.       When a successful teacher will teach the children, he/she will teach them the secrets of success in life - honesty, integrity and hard work

Teachers are Nation builders. They are actually 'learning designers' as they have to modify their approach to suit individual students. There are no bad students, they are the ones just not interested in what the teacher teaches, and they in turn will have to identify the areas where these students will excel. It is less about imparting knowledge and more about nurturing the so-called soft skills students will need in the workplace of the future, such as curiosity and critical thinking.

In this context it is also important to understand how best we can use the internet and the cell phone to improve the education of tomorrow. Ideas for the future of schooling are on display in Byju's and EduTECH as these tech companies fight for a slice of the billion-dollar global education market and teachers look for ways to integrate technology into the classroom. The government should have a policy of using them to improve the cognitive skills of our children. Today, when the attention span of children is less than that of a goldfish, history can be taught by virtual reality and video games in addition to the mundane history books. But one must not forget that these 21st. century add ons are but just that, add ons. They cannot replace good teachers. And encouraging kids to play video games only and call it teaching is only going to hasten the growth of their waste-line, their reduction in gross motor skills and create a generation of pale-skinned vitamin D deficient anti-social geeks. Surely we do not need them.

The current didactic I-talk-you-listen pedagogy we call 'teaching' is tradition-based rather than evidence-based. Teachers are not only underpaid and undervalued, but also under-trained and under-skilled. This cannot continue. We need proud professionals who will change the sorry state of affairs.