To sir with love

no reply :-(

It just struck me that I have less than 6 months left in this institute. By April next year, I would have finished 18 years of education, spread over 5 separate educational institutions covering a latitudinal range from Andaman and Nicobar Islands and an attitudinal diversity encompassing both rigid discipline and complete autonomy. At the end of it all, what is it that I have actually learnt.
Well a couple of things, to be frank. Firstly that the way the education system is run in the country means that very often studying is the prime obstacle to a student's learning. Education is supposed to transcend books, memorization, go beyond the written word, affect each and every aspect of a human life. It is a force, a very potent force, for it unleashes the power of human thought, surely the most constructive and at the same time, destructive force the world has ever known. Learning is a process without end, with no set timings and no fixed arena where it happens. It is experiential, books and other such media can only be facilitators of the process by which a person makes sense of the world around him or her. Yet we often treat their contents as the final destination of scholastic investigation. There ought to be a joy in learning, a joy of being able to think and explain the mysteries and complexities of the world around you by building on principles extracted from books written and thoughts expressed by others. Yet how many of us view education in that paradigm? Education is seen only as a means of getting a good job. I take a different view. If the worth of education is purely in its instrumentality, then let us close down all schools and apprentice all our children to blacksmiths and carpenters. The difference between an educated person and a highly skilled person lies in the ability to think differently. In a sense, education is a great leveller. A person may not be as strong as a blacksmith, but if he is educated, he can build a machine that can do the work of ten blacksmiths in a day. The uneducated blacksmith is an obedient workhorse, he can do his work the way it is supposed to be done efficiently all day long. The educated person will question why does it need to be done this way, is there no better method. Thus education is a tool of revolution, arming those who gain it with the weapons of thought to challenge conventional wisdom, agitate them enought to question and reject what is commonly believed and then strive to change things around them.
I've come a long way from the time when I was 5 years old, taking my first steps into school. The trajectory of my life has taken me from the liberal-middle class, progressive ethos of Modern School Barakhamba Road, to the egalitarian Jesuit ethos of Carmel School, Port Blair, to the stifling greenhouse of IIT Delhi, to the freedom and diversity of UMASS, Amherst and finally, to this motley mix of people and ideas, IIMA. Each one has affected me in its own way.
As I sit back to think about the common thread that runs between each of these institutions, the answer is invariably, the teachers. Over the course of the last 18 years, I've seen all types of them, invigorating, soporific, inspiring, demotivating, cynical, idealistic, lenient and strict. Yet, the only thing I really believe that separates a good teacher from a bad one is the realization that the teacher is also the taught. A teacher doesn't really have any answers to provide to a student, at best they can offer a point of view and more importantly, a way to think. Those teachers who put themselves on a pedestaland consider themselves omniscient and consider stuffing facts and ideas into the heads of pupils are the truly poor teachers, for they achieve nothing of the elightening mission they champion. A true teacher would firstly acknowledge the limitations of his or her own knowledge and would see the process of tutelage as a two way learning process. The inspirational teachers are the ones who assist their pupils on their journey of intellectual refinement, not by giving them all the answers, but teaching them how and where to look for those answers.
In a sense, a teacher's job is paradoxical. A teacher's greatest utility lies in making himself or herself useless. He or she is most valuable when he or she is no longer needed by the student. A teacher can only lead a student up to a certain point and then leave him alone to forge his own way after giving him the necessary assurance that he will never have to go backwards for ignorance of how to proceed. Where he ends up is something he will decide for himself. If only more and more teachers making students mindlessly recite passages from books would learn this, our country would have far more educators than instructors.