Some students and friends approached Dr. Sarvepalli
Radhakrishnan in 1962, the then President of the country and a former
academician having stints with University of Calcutta, University of Oxford and
Banaras Hindu University, requesting him to allow them to celebrate his
birthday falling on September 5. Dr. Radhakrishnan instead opinionated to
observe his birthday as the Teachers’ Day, in respect of the contribution of
the teaching fraternity and since then we observe 5th September
every year as the Teachers’ Day.
Dr. Radhakrishnan believed ‘teachers should be the best
minds in the country’.
That was in 1962.
Figures like Dr. Radhakrishnan do inspire even today but
what about the teachers of the day?
Do they still inspire? Do they come from among the best
minds in the country? Are they motivated enough to build the character of the
students?
In a report released on September 3, India
What is behind this sluggish performance? Certainly not
‘the best of the minds and the motivated teaching professionals’!
What ails the teachers in the Indian education system,
especially the elementary education that builds the character of the students
to prepare them to take the higher challenges?
At elementary and college level, it is not attracting the
best of the minds. Let’s see some of the parameters to see the ground reality:
Compromised compensation
It is basically about the systemic flaws in the education
system that initially paid teachers so less that they never bothered to be
concerned about the quality of teaching because they always found it hard to
meet the ends in their families. According to the Department of Teacher
Education and Literacy, Ministry of the Human Resource Development, the
entry-level basic salary of a central government teacher was Rs. 1200 in 1994
that rose to Rs. 4500 in 2004. Going by the trend, it can be safely said the
state government figures were around this or even lower than this. It tells of
a long period when teachers in primary schools were so poorly paid that almost
of them considered their jobs as secondary in nature and did other sundry jobs
to meet the ends.
After the 5th Pay Commission, an average
teacher earns Rs. 12000 basic salary a month for teaching around 40-50
students. With allowances and other perks, it works out to be around 30-40,000
for experienced teachers and 25-30,000 for entry-level teachers in many states
and the central government run schools. But it cannot change the mindset of the
scores of the teachers who have seen the days of scanty salaries and they
continue to affect the performance of even the new entrants because most of
them are in senior positions or are principals.
And even after the 5th Pay Commission, the
annual increment is a fixed paltry sum of Rs. 500.
The condition is worse in private schools with sub-Rs 5000
salaries being the norm barring few international schools and no word on annual
increments. According to an EY-FICCI report, 25% of the primary and secondary
schools in India India
Less qualified
According to a report by the Azim Premji Foundation, an
education non-profit, 45% of the teachers in primary schools were just 12th
grade holders. The report rues the lack of proper training and flawed teaching
methodology focusing on exams and not on students.
Given this fact, it is not surprising that the country had
the dropout rate of around 40% at the elementary level last year a CRY report
said.
These teachers are trained to follow the system, expected
to report to the school daily, teach students multiple subjects and carry out
exams. These teachers are also expected to carry out many other assignments and
are ordered to give them precedence over the academic work because even the
system training and employing them is not serious about school education in India
Such teachers are merely followers carrying out the
instructions collecting their pay packets while the crux of education is
innovation and creativeness on pedagogy.
Burdened, overworked
According to a 2013 Wharton study, the average count of
workforce in the primary schools of India
According to the Right to Education Act (RTE), the
teacher-student ratio should be 30:1 but in reality this is a mess. An
assessment by the Azim Premji Foundation found that beyond the student-teacher
ratio of 40:1, the possibility of a strong performance was reduced to less that
2%.
Going beyond the statistics of the different reports on
teacher-student ratio, what is disturbing is the shortage of teachers in India India
And such teachers burdened with higher number of students
are forced to get engaged in different administrative works.
Elections from state assemblies to local bodies are held
almost every year and teachers from primary and upper primary schools are
deployed. The process is long and takes months, collecting information, preparing
voter rolls and distributing the voter cards. The diversion of teachers in such
works leaves schools and students with very few teachers to manage the academic
affairs.
Additionally, the teachers are deployed for other
non-teaching works like Census counting, Pulse Polio programme or other survey
studies.
In fact, the Bombay High Court last year had asked the Maharashtra government not to burden the teachers with
the mid-day meal scheme calling it non-educational work, an in-house work that
requires the teachers to manage the meal distribution work in schools cooked by
a dedicated staff. So what about the field work activities like preparing voter
lists or conducting Census surveys?
Already burdened with higher number of students and a not
so handsome salary with sky-rocketing prices, the motivation is further drawn
away by such engagements, especially for the entrants, when they are paid
peanuts for such other works they do.
How can we expect such teachers to be motivated enough to
go the extra mile while teaching the students when we cannot create the basic
situations required for that?
They are not properly trained, many are less qualified and
all of them are burdened, financially and professionally.
It is said an educator needs to remain student throughout
the life to remain updated with knowledge, in order to impart that learning to
the students. But what if we don’t allow the teachers to remain even full-time
teachers?
And it reflects in the performance. According to the
latest Annual Status of Education Report by the NGO Pratham, though the
enrolment in the elementary education is now almost 100%, the qualitative
output, in terms of the academic abilities of the students, has deteriorated
further.
Three eye-opening important observations from the study
that sum up the quality of education imparted by the teachers in our school
system:
- Nationally, the proportion of children in grade three able to read at least a paragraph of grade one is still abysmally low. In 2013, only two out of five children could achieve this standard.
- Similarly, the proportion of children in the fifth grade at the all-India level who could read a second grade text remained unchanged at the level of 47%. It has decreased every year from 52.8% in 2009.
- Nationally, the proportion of all children in the fifth grade who could solve a three-digit by one-digit division problem was 25.6%, or just above one in four children could do basic math.
Dr. Radhakrishnan had said about the quality of a teacher:
“Teachers need to be leaders in their own right, capable of proactive
thinking, open to changes and challenges, able to inspire, motivate,
demonstrate by example and finally with a realisation that they have a huge
responsibility of nation-building.”
Do we have such teachers today in our school system?
©/IPR: Santosh Chaubey - http://severallyalone.blogspot.com/
