“Good teachers are costly, but bad teachers cost more.”, facetiously quoted by Mr. Bob Talbert. Yes, facetious because it urges a grin on my face even after being so critical in its meaning. ‘Teacher’ as an entity, throughout the course of time, has been perceived by some as the ultimate good and by others as the ultimate bad! Those purporting it as bad are primarily the ones living presently and those who have lived within the last century or so.
Actually, the change in people’s perception towards teachers since the last century mostly owes to experimentation and the veracity of Newton’s third law. Teachers have now started experimenting with their roles and eventually with their conscience as well. Their set of actions has seen an expansion from imparting merely the spiritual, moral or scientific knowledge to some novel enthralling forms of knowledge as well.
In a way, the job of teaching has now got dispersed into seven hues of a rainbow from previously being a perennial white light. It is this arrival of new colors which has led to the shift of a teacher’s image from being utopian to a more notorious one in recent times.
It is worth discerning that how the definition of teacher has got modified with the passage of time. Each teacher is shrouded with a different color. Some of these colors seem soothing to the eye, some mundane and some become the itch of our eyes. Won’t it be intriguing to take a brief look at some of these colors of the contemporary teacher? Let’s do it then!
Even in the decade of culminating inflation where even grooming up one’s hair costs half a thousand, teachers, who groom the complete life and personality of a person are impelled to deliver their services at a trivial salary. Yet, these are those teachers for whom the increment of the intellect and knowledge of their pupils is more gratifying than a monetary increment. These are those parents who instead of being one, don’t want their children to become teachers crediting to the languish state of teachers in India. One can understand the gravity of the present situation by the fact that a student, who learnt the skills of converting knowledge into money from a teacher, starts making more money than that teacher at an age two to three folds less than him/her. Besides all these demoralizing facts, these teachers diligently carry on their duty of imparting education and ethos to millions of blooming buds of India.
India is an exemplar of perfect mutual co-existence of bright-colored and dark-colored teachers. If teachers as bright as those mentioned above exist, then, their opposites also prowl in a significant amount. These are the beacons of corporal punishment! Trait of being undutiful is merely a sophomore for these vizards. What they primarily do is cane innocent children on the name of teaching them and more or less imprints an image of devil in the minds of children. Such teachers more or less represent the itching colors of the rainbow.
Next, there are those mundane-colored teachers who perform their work in a very mainstream way. But I’m in no mood of discussing mainstream so better skip this sect of teachers.
Arriving at teachers with cupid-like and luring colors, it is worth noticing that this breed of teachers reflects the rather facetious side of teachers with an affinity towards preaching the language of love and romance to its desperate disciples. These teachers subtly play with the carnage desires and the mating-obsessed psychology of human beings. No doubt, as a tribute to their contribution in imparting the all important ‘love-education’ to people, we call them the ‘Love-Gurus’.
Time for the teachers with all new striking and a mélange of shining colors! A class of tech-savvy turned ‘tech-gurus’ who believe in proliferating their omni-updated(didn’t mind coining a new word for this new swanking category) technical knowledge to the remnant human fraternity. They inculcate, in the ignorant ones, a basic sense of utilizing the technical wonders in minimizing the chance of errors and human labor.
These many paradigms are good enough to understand the varied kinds of teachers co-existing currently in India. Also, it justifies that why, since the last century, some people have started censuring teachers in general. But it isn’t rational that we refuse to give the homage to the teachers who deserve it. Teaching is not a lost art, but the regard for it has become a lost tradition. It’s true that this hallowed art has nowadays become somewhat oblique due to its rogue counterfeits but then eradicating such disparaging elements should be considered as an act of reciprocation to what it has always endowed on all of us.
