TEACHER EDUCATION
During the Gandhi centenary year I made a small experiment I asked a group of intellectuals; 'where Gandhi was born?' Many did not know. Those who knew said that he was born in Porbunder. When asked 'where in Porbunder,' they were completely blank. All of them, however, knew that the residence of the British Prime Minister is 10 Downing Street. Gandhi has been so ritualised, even in textbooks, that young children grow averse to Gandhi by the time they come to the end of the school. These episodes bring out forcefully that something is wrong with our education system. It is not that the top intellectuals presents in the Delhi meeting that day had forgotten Gandhi's address; thanks to the education system, more and more Indians forget their Indian address everyday.
There is one thing common among countries with a colonial past. They have inherited certain systems from the colonial days. Managers of such systems, having stepped into the shoes of the erstwhile masters, enjoy all the privileges of the systems. But as a public stance they blame the system for all the ills. They are ones responsible for status quo. They are instrumental in perpetuating the system. Yet they pose as the leaders of academic revolutions. In the early sixties America designed a machine to pluck tomatoes. This machine plucked tomatoes of a certain size and left out the smaller ones. Research was then conducted to change the breed of tomatoes so that they would be of uniform size. Today in our country planning in general and educational planning in particular is carried on in the above manner. Instead of fitting education to the needs of the people, people are asked to fit themselves to the need of the education system.
India is a multilingual, multiethnic and multicultural country. From Himalayas to the Kanyakumari, from Arunachal to Gujarat there is tremendous variation in ecological conditions and consequently in life styles, dress and food habits, crop cycles and even in health and disease pattern. Yet a uniform schooling with uniform curriculum, uniform textbooks, uniform school timings and uniform method of teaching is sought to be imposed in the whole country. A child from Biligirirangan Hills and one from Bangalore are expected to complete the same course within the same time. If at all any differences are thought of, then the curriculum is diluted for the disadvantaged thus making him permanently disable. No serous thought has been given to the question of comparability of diverse patterns and end products of distinctly different systems. Creativity and innovativeness are used as slogans. So is competence based teacher education, since there is no teacher education which is not competence based.
A uniform pattern of schooling aids the elite. They are private tuition and provide books and other teaching aids to their children outside school. The socially and economically disadvantaged parent cannot even provide textbooks, which are progressivelly growing in volume and cost. Nobody bothers as to how creativity and innovativeness could at all develop in school where the stress is on uniformity. And yet for more and more children school is becoming the only place to get education that brings success in life. For poor education in the university the college is blamed; for poor education in the college, the secondary school is blamed; for poor secondary education, the primary education is blamed; for poor primary education, the parents are blamed for providing such poor material. The parents have nowhere to go. The successful among the parents send their children to school which ensure future success. All experiments are conducted at the cost of the under privileged. The disadvantaged parent has little choice but to accept the oppressive system and pay for it.
To be a teacher under such condition is not an easy thing. First of all education standards are not set by teachers, not even by educationists in our country. Admission to a 'foreign' school or a school subsidiary to or modelled after it determines the standard of all schools, lower or higher. Secondly the teacher is poorly paid. With the rise in prices and craze for consummerism he can maintain 'standard' only by extorting money from the students through 'fair' or 'foul' means. Thirdly, the teacher has little social prestige. Today a constable is respected more than a head master. 25 years ago Pandit Nehru had said the "he felt ashamed that the salary of chaprasis in Delhi was more than that of the average school teacher in India. He said: 'I am sorry to say the condition of teachers who mould the character of children is not good and their place in our society is not high." (Indian Express, Jan 5, 1957).
The fate of primary and secondary teachers is not much different today. The teacher is abused by the student, the parent, the school authority and the politicians. Last, but not the least, the teacher is vastly under-prepared for the role he is called upon the play. Consequently he becomes a trade unionist, or politician and anything but a teacher.
If nobody in the society is willing and able to bring about a social revolution, there is no reason why the teacher alone should be expected to do it nor why the teacher should bear the mantle of being the sole ignition of a 'man making process'. According to the admission of Teacher Education Curriculum: A Framework, "teacher training institutions stand isolated from the mainstream of national life, from the academic life of the university, from schools, from on another, and what is most serious, from the very community which they are supposed to serve." (Introduction, p2). If education is considered to be the instrument of social change and the teacher is the activator of this instrument, then a static system of teacher education cannot produce a dynamic teacher who can motivate social change.
Education is a composite responsibility in more than one sense. One stage of education cannot be isolated from another, and from cradle to grave all stages of education are interdependent. Education in different regions of a country are interlinked. Thus even if education were a State subject in India, one cannot study them in isolation from one another. Thirdly all disciplines studied both horizontally and vertically must be seen as an integrated whole. Fourthly, integration among theory, pedagogy, skills, methodology, attitude and behaviour is an essential feature of education. What is most important is the reflection of the composite culture of India in the education system of the country. Teacher education in India, unfortunately, is not task oriented. Even a casual analysis would show the gap among teacher competence, curricular demand, textbook, and method of teaching. It shows the isolation of teacher education from the community and from one another in different regions and levels. The blame for this will have to be shared by the entire education system.
At the primary level of education, in spite of a constitutional directive, only 58 out of over 1600 mother tongues are media of education. Instead of devising strategies to link the mother tongue with the standard or the culture language, an effort is made to deride the mother tongue which has serious educational implications. If a Soliga or a Kuruba child began his education through the mother tongue but through a well adjusted bilingual primary education programme became so competent in Kannada that at the post primary stage he could study as equal with Kannada children, it could not only have let to better understanding among the majority and minority children, it would, by averting identity crisis, have yielded better educational results. Under the present dispensation mother tongue, instead of becoming a resource, has become a problem. As a result even in the Hindi zone Maithili had to be accorded the special status as medium of education till the secondary stage. The assertion of identity by many small languages and demands of dialect speakers for being accorded special recognition is a direct result of the attitude of domination.
The school building, the white collar attitude, and unfamiliar language are sufficient to alienate a child form the environment. What is worse, education is not carried to the child working in the fields and factories. The child is put in schools and taught work experience which is irrelevant to his milieu. We have adopted the three-language formula. But there is little research about the age and stage at which the second language is to be introduced. In teaching the first language the emphasis is on teaching literature. Because of the lack of exposure to conceptual prose, the language of science and that of social sciences, at the school stage, the child finds himself incapable of studying subjects even through the mother tongue. Teaching of English and teaching through English have been subjects of national debate ever since the British laid the foundation of the modern education system. Most teachers believe that English has a civilising effect and without it Indian education will fall into the middle ages. As a result of such faith English has been so ritualised that nobody pays any attention to the methods, material and teacher preparation in this field. It is taken for granted that long years in English education can make one proficient in English. When graduates say things like 'God shave the Queen', 'we are in the well', 'we have come to pay our last respects to you', or 'Am I cockroaching on your time?' One cannot but notice the change that is taking place. No wonder that without proficiency either in the mother tongue or in English the young boys and girls perform poorly in school and college. It has been well established that language skill and mathematical skills are connected. One who is good in language is good in mathematics. One example will make it clear. New set theory is introduced as early as in the fifth standard. If a question is asked, 'Given 18 red and blue balls how does one go about dividing them into sets?' This cannot be answered without resolving the linguistic ambiguity. If some are red and some are blue then they would become two sets, whereas if all are partially red and partially blue then they will be one set. In spite of all these, very little attention is given to the language education.
Witgenstein has said that all philosophy is language philosophy. Following him one can say that all education is language education. Beginning from the early concept formation and cognition to creativity, innovativeness, expression or concealment of thought, logical formulation of propositions, coherent presentation of discourses, in all facets of human existence language plays a crucial role. It is the medium as well as expression of culture. Yet the highest educational authority in the land finds language the most inconvenient subject to talk about. They talk of curriculum without reference to language. They talk about science and technology curriculum forgetting that in absorbing the scientific culture it is not the new technical terminology or comprehend the concept underlying this terminology that blocks educational development.
Today, in the field of education the labels and slogans change and the old systems are condemned, but the same people continue in the leadership position. This is one of the reasons why education in general and teacher education in particular has remained static and unresponsive to the needs of a fast changing society. While the enemy within the system is engaged only in preserving its privilege base, the enemies outside contribute no less to its destruction. The insensitive bureaucracy which perpetuates uniformity as a matter of administrative convenience seeks alliance with the academic managers. As a result, when production of bureaucrats continue unabated, the teacher training schools and colleges are closed down. The teachers prefer to become bureaucrats whereas the bureaucrats pretend scholarship or aspire for it. This produces a sorry spectacle for education in the country. The political leadership is temporarily incapacitated by the combined thrust of the 'Education experts' and the 'Bureaucratic managers of education'.The UNESCO meeting in Paris in December 1981 convened to discuss mother tongue as medium of instruction, of which I was elected Chairman, was unanimous among other things, in passing a resolution that language education should form a component of all teacher education. The framework of Teacher Education published by the NCERT does not show any awareness of this. The framework speaks of core and optional courses. But if regional culture should be optional for the region concerned as suggested, then the country will be irrevocably segmented. Unfortunately, there is not a single textbook of history even today which speaks of Indian people as a whole and of their composite culture. If Shivaji is lionised in Maharashtra and degraded in Bengal, if north Indian kings and their exploits are joined by similar empire buildrers from the south, national integration cannot be attained. History must speak also of the Savaras and Kiratas along with the Aryans and Dravidians and speak of the cultural universals resulting from their interaction. Today there is a great need for integration of courses to develop a synthesis. Indian teacher educators must work towards such a synthesis.
There was great excitement when we brought out an Indian edition of Edgar Faure Report 'Learning to Be'. The title itself was reason enough for great merriment. When I pointed out to a few friends that the word vidya from vid- 'to know' and vid- 'to exist' means Existence in Learning, or Learning is Bing or Learning to Be or Being is to Learn, they resented saying that for once I had failed into the traps of antiquarians. For such of my friends modernity is rejection of Indianness. But they forget that a country bereft of tradition cannot become truly modern.
The challenge before the teacher educator today is manifold. He must fight the enemy within and the enemy without. He has to streamline the curriculum, modernise the methods and update the knowledge content in textbooks. He must not only integrate the courses but integrate the courses with life so that they become a model himself for the teachers who graduate through his hands. He cannot forget that he is a teacher and in order to justify this role he must continue to be a learner. Then only he will be the forerunner of a learning society. At a time when there knowledge explosion, continued learning is the only guarantee against obsolescence.
Professional organisations of teachers and teacher educators have to take a active role in improving the competency of teachers. Ability to put he same point in different ways to suit the needs of students of differing competence in a class demands great communicational competence and consequently great facility in language. Teacher educators must address themselves to the question of handing over some of the tasks they are called upon to handle to general education. That will free them to concentrate on inter-disciplinary approaches which bear upon their discipline. They must draw upon the findings of psychology, linguistics, sociology and pedagogy in preparing curriculum for renewal. Educational planning in India, being sectoral, there are competing demands from higher and lower education and teacher education cutting across different sectors is handled differentially in different sectors. There is no wonder that teacher education in general and in lower stages in particular receives such little attention.
Our States and Union Territories have a great tradition in education and culture. They have always attracted great teachers. Each teacher is a teacher educator in the sense that he trains future teachers. With the development of teacher education as a separate discipline proliferation of teacher training institutions has taken place in the country. However, during the past years teacher training through correspondence has been introduced in some states. With the expansion of teacher education, great confusion has been created as adequate attention has not been given to qualitative aspects. A study of the school education in the state reveals that the teacher education syllabus has not kept up with the task of preparing competent teachers to handle school curriculum. The school curriculums themselves are under great strain as the vested interest in textbook writing creates further gap by not reflecting the intent of the curriculum. Under these circumstances one can only wish luck to the harassed teachers and teacher educators.