The Kalam Advisory

Former President Dr APJ Abdul Kalam — the Missile Man of India who was denied a second term in the Rashtrapati Bhawan by the previous UPA government in a brazen show of opportunistic politics — continues to inspire the country with his brilliant ideas of nation-building. Dr Kalam as President today would have perhaps been the best motivator for the youth of the country, a segment who the former President has wonderfully appealed to on every occasion. No wonder then that while speaking on ‘‘Capacity Building on Young Minds’’ for the Central Institute for Educational Technology (CIET) lecture series at IIT-Delhi the other day, he should come up with a very radical idea of transforming the Indian system of primary education. He said that just as IAS officers were recruited after a rigorous process of preliminary round, main examination and finally interview in which only a minuscule fraction of the total candidates would be selected, primary school teachers too should go through a similar process. What Dr Kalam is trying to suggest is that the prevailing system of recruiting teachers at the primary level — and it is equally true of the recruitment system at all levels to appoint teachers — has resulted in a bogus regime where the so-called teachers themselves do not know what they are, and how they should be, teaching the tender and impressionable minds. In other words, they are anything but teachers, for they are forced into a profession as responsible as teaching due solely to them being total misfits for any other profession. Therefore, what we have as teachers in our schools are people who like or know anything but teaching! And this has proved to be disastrous for the country’s school system. True, there may be exceptions, but this community is a paltry lot, hence insignificant. The vast majority of our school teachers have just no idea of what constitutes the true process of teaching, and for them education is only about teaching their students how to score marks by learning by rote.

Dr Kalam, therefore, has called for a meaningful change to do away with such a damaging education stereotype. ‘‘Schools are evaluated according to the performance of students, but a paradigm shift is required where the way students are groomed is important,’’ he said. He has raised a very valid point. When it comes to education in the true sense of the term, unlike that teachers by default and pseudo-educators understand, there is absolutely no reason why performance of students in examinations that are often neither valid nor reliable should continue to be the main criterion of evaluating schools and their style of imparting education. Education in the true sense of the term is about the manner in which students are groomed — or cultured — by their teachers who know what the business of teaching really is and what forms the essence of education. What is the percentage of such teachers? How many teachers are interested in fashioning the creative faculty of their students? Hence the Kalam advisory — to recruit a community of teachers through a rigorous process of selection so that the teachers are a genuine teaching species. However, this alone will not suffice. Let such teachers be also paid very handsomely as they will deserve as and when they begin to happen to our schools. SOURCE: THE SENTINEL