1. Three Social Professions
There are three social professions; those of doctors, lawyers and teachers.
2. Doctor As A Continuous Learner
Primarily, it is the medical profession that is foremost among the three. A doctor is one who pulls a patient who seeks his help out of the mouth of death. (1) He is the harbinger of hope in the middle of abject misery (2) not only for one person who is ailing but also for other near ones around. (3) No doubt, there are exceptions in the modern days where this profession also attracts corrupt practices (4) or lack of concern for the patients whom they treat or look after. There is always a need for learning and development (5) because new diseases and new medicines arrive into the scenes of human lives. The most important aspect of this profession is that there is a one to one relationship (6) in this profession of consultancy and offer of help.
3. Lawyer As A Continuous Learner
In addition, there is the profession of the lawyer who addresses human concerns that are brought up from time to time between and among people which the lawyer considers (1) and presents before a judge or a jury. In this process, the lawyer is always on the side of his client (2) even when he may doubt the authenticity of the cause of the client. Just as the client needs to succeed the lawyer has also a need to succeed for the benefits of the lawyer’s own popularity as a professional (3) as more and more clients would approach him when he is a successful one. Also, the lawyer needs to study and discover different types of laws (4) and the possible support from each of them to plead for the client. Simultaneously, the lawyer has also a need to study different judgements, (5) different laws, different systems and procedures so as to present the clients’ case. The lawyer’s dealings, like those of the doctors, are always one to one (6) because he takes up just one case of an individual at a time in front of a judge or jury.
4. Teacher As A Custodian of Unchallenged Knowledge
More importantly, there is the profession of a teacher. The village school master is an all knowing and all important person. (1) The teacher remains the most important person for the students. The teacher is the most knowledgeable person among the ignorant (2) who assemble together to get the best from the teacher for their life thereafter. They are always willing to do whatever the teacher would ask them to do. Even the elder students in the colleges and universities generally do not dare to challenge the knowledge (3) of the teacher. Thus, anyone in the teacher’s profession enjoys an unlimited and unanswerable position (4) leading oneself to some sort of infallibility bordering on equal sort of divinity. However, there is one difference between the doctors and lawyers on one side and the teacher on the other. The teaching profession does not work on a basis of one to one. (5) It is always one to a crowd (6) with a teacher in the middle of the large number of students.
5. Teacher Becomes One Without Practice
There is a need to emphasise the position and profession of the teacher as much more important than that of a doctor or a lawyer. The simple reason is the reality that even the doctor and the lawyer are taught by teachers (7) who may be doctors and lawyers, but yet, the instructional performances are one of a teacher. There is also a very serious difference that the doctor and the lawyer have to do some practice under the guidance of seniors (8) to start their professional work which a teacher does not have to do. (9) It is presupposed that once a person has completed the necessary studies, the person could directly become this person of unlimited and unanswerable position.
6. Contributions of Educational Experts From Different Levels
Thus, unredeemable as of now is the plight of education in India that it is totally teacher-centric in addition to being content-centric, a British model brought to this country by the colonialists. One cannot forget the services rendered by educational leaders like Abdul Kalam Azad who was the first education minister of the country after independence for more than a decade. There are also a large number of educational experts at political and academic levels who have contributed to the establishment of the type of education that this country has. One cannot simply condemn everything that has happened because there have been several good things also that have been done in the country like the universalisation of primary education and the total literacy campaigns that had been done.
7. Empowering Teachers Through Learning And Development
Dr. V.K.R.V. Rao became the fourth education minister of the country after being a teacher, professor, director and vice chancellor. He did intervene in the educational processes during his time to improve the quality of teachers. There is an interesting story that he had narrated in an article in a newspaper. When he was Director of an institution, he had given a small assignment of making a certificate for a student to one of his assistants who did not complete it even after half an hour. Considering that it needed only just about five minutes to finish the work, Dr. Rao got out of his room, went to the position of this person, asked him to stand up, he occupied the seat and prepared the certificate in five minutes. While looking up from his seat at that assistant, he had an expression on his face meaning that one could do it in five minutes. The person concerned is supposed to have told him that Dr. Rao was occupying the director’s chair because the director could do it in five minutes and that if he was able to perform like that he could have been occupying the director’s chair. Dr. Rao concludes that what matters is empowering people to do whatever they are defined to do. He writes in the article that the major problem in educational endeavours is incompetence of a large number of teachers. They needed learning and development.
8. Need To Be Student-centric and Competent-centric
There is an article by Sharon Sullivan in the book Leading Organisational Learning where he uses a phrase ‘Audacity of Imagination’ (1) and there he refers to all discoveries in the world were made possible only through the audacious use of imagination. (2) He goes on to say that there is enough talent everywhere (3) among the humans. However, the major problem is that neither they nor the others around are aware of this, (4) nor are they competent enough to make such people identify their talents and develop them. (5) In the field of education, most people think that what matters is knowledge management. (6) In fact, he argues that managing knowledge in making learning and development a process in educational institutions goes wrong because of inadvertent and thoughtless beliefs in management (7) of knowledge. More importantly, management of centers of learning ought to be student-centric as well as competent-centric. (8)
9. Leader In The Classroom To Do Service
Robert Greenleaf’s Servant Leadership is a book which got the attention of people in the seventies of the last century. His theory could easily be applied to educational institutions and more so to classrooms. Teacher is a leader in the classroom and is a service leader. The primary responsibility is to adopt every possible strategy, every possible method and every possible technique to influence the student using processes that will take the latter to learning and development by being a leader.
10. New Ideas of A Leader In The Classroom
The issue of leadership of a teacher draws the attention of the speech delivered by Fidel Castro to the students of Havana University, contents of which later became a book. In his inimitable style of asking questions and providing answers to them; he is known for speaking for hours together in the same style; he appeals to the students to think beyond the classrooms and he asks them to give him ideas. He said that new ones were rare and that it would influence societies in different circles and make deliberate attempts for development. So, evidently, it is the influence of the teachers as leaders especially in classrooms that has to make necessary changes in the scenario of education in the country.
11. Teachers Not Free And Unsold
The character Harry in Earnest Hemingway’s Snows of Kilimanjaro speaks about his disadvantages and wants to be free and unsold. Hemingway’s intention to present the character with his great desires is to influence people to understand how they have to be free and unsold. The relevance here is that the teachers here are not free and not unsold. They are imprisoned in the contents that are prescribed to them and they are totally sold out to their own institutions with the latter’s partisan or communal or corporate or all three together objectives. All the same, it may be necessary to add to what has been said to what Spencer Wells kept as a prelude to his path finding book Pandora’s Seed, The Unforeseen Cost of Civilisation. He takes a small event from the annals of Greek mythology and refers to Pandora’s Box. He quotes what was retold by Edith Hamilton, the American educator from Germany that the God’s gave Pandora a box containing many things and asked her not to open it. As she could not contain her curiosity, she opened it one day and before she could clap the lid down, innumerable sorrows and mischiefs for mankind flew out. However, only one thing remained, that was hope.
12. There Is Hope
This the tenth and the last article. Hence the following paragraph.
So, what remains is hope that better education will be offered for future students. Aristotle once said that quality is not an act but a habit. We were also able to see beauteous moments in small proportions. I am sure we also enjoyed, as Wordsworth said, little acts of kindness and of love during these ten days when we thought, listened, discussed and interacted together as a single community of readers with concern.
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Prof. Sunney Tharappan, is Director of College for Leadership and HRD, Mangaluru. He trains and writes and lives in Mangaluru.