Education and the teachers.

I wont be the first to say that what you learn is to a large extent based on how it is taught to you. In school teachers are mostly about who are partial or strict or later in life, well dressed and lucid. But when it is finally time for the application process, it is that time when you realise how important some lessons were and how badly taught others were. May be thats when you realise how important teachers can be to the process of learning.

For me school was the best time where I learnt a lot of a innovative stuff and did not realise how great it was till I saw college. College was an epitome of cavalier attitudes, haanji giri, biases, politics and no education what so ever. In such environs which were non-conducive to learning, we still managed to zero in one teacher who taught very well but taught us a subject like english, which at junior college level ( 2 years after the 10th), was one of the few subjects that did not need teaching.. guidance may be.

But she taught what she had to with interest, made sure we got it right and on the odd day we went to her class, she acknowledged us and never with sarcasm. I was happy seeing that in a staff strength of over 150 teachers there was at least one who cared.

Recently one of my sister's friend signed up for a B.Ed (Bachelor's in Education) and while discussing her subjects, I got to know something. Most colleges in Maharashtra (and all over India) I am told, make sure their teaching staff gets half the salary they sign for. This came as a total shock to me. Bear in mind that here I have no "hard numbers" as it were but have an aunt who now heads a B.Ed college and did the same for over fifteen years of her teaching career.

It came as a shock, not because I thought the teachers and the institution of education was not corruptible, but because it made the picture crystal clear. The disinterest, the lack of initiative and the disuse of their skills. One cannot entirely blame the teachers.

How will the next generation produce A-grade work and results when the quality of education continues to remain poor? Forget paying teachers well, not even paying them how much you think they deserve is abyssmal! To expect them to give their best is ridiculous.

My sister's college is one the better ones in Mumbai and she still had teachers who taught them for the love of teaching the subject and went without salaries for over six months. But not every college is that lucky and a lot of them do work for money.

For a brief moment I thought may be this happens only in Mumbai but I was told it is worse in the north. Of course I have nothing to back this up and could just chalk it up to another urban reality, in such a corruptible country but it saddens me immensely.

We wonder why there is a brain drain among a lot of other whys. Education cannot be elite and expensive for people to be able to afford it but then while my school was a private school and there I was given a lot of priviledges. Am sure a lot of municipal school suffer from such ignorance and therefore so many dropouts.

I just dont any more.