Toothless Teachers - Tough Students

My Article Write - up in The Millennium Post Newspaper (Delhi Edition) - 23 December 2017, Page 9

Toothless Teachers - Tough Students

Parents and Teachers have remained the epitome of human respect and dignity since time immemorial. No matter whether a child is honourable or a rogue, he remains in his dignified best in front of them. Mother has always been the pivotal force and an emotional epicentre for any human being.  The Hindi oldies have depicted this serene emotion beautifully hundreds of times. The famous dialogue “Mere Paas Maa Hai” of the bollywood blockbuster Deewar became the symbol of India’s rich culture. Maestro A. R. Rahman in his Oscars’ speech quoted the same portraying India’s ethnic richness. The news-items surfacing of late is showing that the times have changed since then, recent news of a sixteen year old murdering his mother and sister with his cricket bat, pizza cutter and scissors came like a nightmare and the first thought to hit was, “Is it a part of some new bollywood flick?”. To everybody’s horror, it wasn’t a movie scene but a real life incident.

It’s not an isolated incident, last September two class twelfth students stabbed their teacher when he didn’t allow them to sit in the examination due to their less attendance. The teacher later succumbed to the wounds in the hospital. In November a news item shook the town of Bahadurgarh, Haryana when a student brutally beats the teacher in a school because he got less marks in Mathematics. The entire incident was caught in the CCTV cameras of the school. Most infamous of them all is the recent incident of a Gurugram school boy murdering a seven year old in the school premises. Similar incident happened in a government school of Faridabad a year earlier. Molestation of young girls in the school, toilets, playgrounds and school buses by senior boys has become a daily affair for the newspaper headlines. It is a matter of shame that our society has come to its extreme lowness. Today India is gradually replacing the west in terms of the degree of crime. That is why the Juvenile Justice Board has decided to consider the minor accused as an adult.

It is high time we should introspect and find the fault. Who is to blame for this sudden splurge in the heinous crime rate? Who is snatching away the childhood of our children? Is it the disintegration of joint family system, influence of television and internet, lack of time, availability of easy funds or uncontrolled freedom? It is not that such incidents take birth over night. They are the reflection of our changing society. According to psychologist Vikas Attry, “our society is undergoing a huge churning, the vibrations of which can be felt at school levels but we prefer not to move by it, like an ostrich prefers to bury his head under sand if it encounters an enemy pretending he has seen none, later to be killed by one”. He further adds, emotions are gradually becoming dead because we are feeding our young ones with too much attention and never saying no to them. The younger generation is not used to hear a ‘no’ for their demands, no matter how vague they may be.  

Most of the Government schools do not have adequate infrastructure and human resources. The hyper skewed pupil to teacher ratio often leads to neglect and students derail before time. The private schools have become sanctum sanctorum where each child is being worshipped. The teachers are equipped with no tools to counter them but to surrender to their temperament and mood swings. The greatest sage and teacher Chanakya proposed four cardinal methods namely Saam, Daan, Dand, Bhed in order to get the work done. The concept of Dand has totally been wiped out from the present education system. Dand is not corporal punishment but the sense of abiding by the responsibilities given, be it towards the parents, teachers or institutions. In today’s times a teacher is equipped with no tool to instigate this responsibility among the students. There is a huge void between what is said in the rule books and what practicality demands. It is said that every child is special, but the schools are actually becoming marks minting factories. Teachers are more into training rather than educating as this is what the unwritten rule of their service books demand.    

Counselling of the students has become synonymous to giving them extra attention which they want to grab if not through legitimate action then through mischief. The problem aggravates in the small towns where the parents are semi-literate or illiterates. The stubbornness of the child plays merry hell in front of the timid personality of the parents. Upbringing of a child leads to additional problems as it always keeps the parents in constant fear as the former might take a wrong step of harming himself resulting in the latter surrendering in front of their young ones. This universal mode of surrender from the parents and teachers gives them an edge and make them attention seeking individuals. They are unduly pampered and all their demands are met at any cost. ‘Break-up, move-on, one night stand, so-what, bottoms-up, smoke it out’ have become the part of school-goers lingo. Defiance of a child is not curtailed but celebrated in these institutions. ‘My way or highway’ has become the cult among students, because schools are nurturing and fostering this trend subconsciously.

Today education sector is flooded with advisories for educators, each one hosting a new diktat and hundreds of ‘don’ts’ rather than focusing on the ‘dos’. We are forgetting that these children are the future workforce and entrepreneurs. How will they cope up with the brutal realities of life and work?  After a decade or two, this generation will probably become emotion numb as acceptance for each and everything is gradually becoming a part of their lives. We as the society do not understand that we are applying a wrong solution to this problem. Instead of the Juvenile Justice Board considering the child as an ‘adult’, the school should consider them as one and take the necessary actions before it’s too late. Children are attaining maturity at an early age; this fact still remains indigestible to the society at large. Some intellectuals accept this but prefer to remain neutral in the open.

The need of the hour is to equip teachers with tools to curtail and counter the uncontrolled rage and demands of the students at the school level itself before it punches the society on its face. Eradicating an educator from his purgatory is a sin being committed by the stakeholders. It is like expecting the former to prepare a divine cuisine without using a knife. Small amercements at school are beneficial for the larger good of students. Sanctions at the school levels both by parents and teachers are necessary for exonerations later in life. This beautiful couplet from Ramdhari Singh ‘Dinkar’ the Rashtrakavi (National Poet) of India summarizes the current situation of teachers and beautifully narrates the expiate: ‘Kshama shobhati us bhujung ko jiske paas garal ho, usko kya jo dantheen vishrahit vineet saral ho’. 

Jagdeep S. More, Educationist