I 'teach' disrespect. Huh?

I hear from my boys in class that some so-called teachers in that school where I, for my sins,  taught for fourteen years are still abusing me behind my back, seventeen years after I quit – futilely, it goes without saying, because they are too dense to notice that what they think and say about me hasn’t mattered one whit to my professional reputation. The real reason is of course only impotent envy, one of the basest, and alas, most common of human emotions, especially if those humans are middle class Bengalis. They have said many ugly things about me in the past; now, apparently, all they can think of to revile me is that I ‘teach’ my pupils to ‘disrespect’ their parents. It could be brushed away with a derisive laugh of the Bertie Wooster vintage, but let me do them the honour of taking cognizance and analysing why I should do such a thing if I do it at all…

One reason I might behave like that (and have been apparently doing so for donkey’s years) is that I am simply mad. An interesting conjecture, really, and one that not a few have toyed with. If I am, there’s no help for it at this late date. But I wonder if it is possible for a madman to be professionally successful – and that too in a sober job like teaching – and if it is, shouldn’t madness be prescribed for young people who are aspiring to be as successful or more so?

But just suppose I am not mad. Why, then, should I ‘teach’ youngsters to disrespect their parents? Won’t the word spread far and wide soon enough, and seeing that it is the parents who pay me, won’t they get miffed enough in bulk to see to it that their wards stop attending my tuition: my only source of bread and butter for all these years? Why, instead, have the numbers kept swelling over the last two decades to the extent that my real problem is having to handle too many people, and making many of them unhappy by having to turn them away? If I did teach my pupils to be disrespectful, how have I managed to keep that a secret from the parents for all these years – a secret which, curiously enough, lots of schoolteachers in my town are privy to?

Then again, most of these wiseacres forget that I have been (quite a successful-) parent myself. My daughter attended my classes like any other pupil for several years. Naturally I dealt with them the same way and said exactly the same things to all of them: and look, my daughter has not grown up to ‘disrespect’ me! Which means that I either don’t ‘teach’ them anything like that,  or that I am a very poor teacher, doesn’t it?

I teach English, which involves not only dealing with the prescribed textbooks of the ICSE syllabus but also handling things like grammar, comprehension and composition. In the course of such things, I discuss many things with my pupils indeed, so that they can understand their texts well and learn to express themselves intelligently, coherently and in a well-informed manner. Among hundreds of subjects, the issue of parent-child relationships certainly crops up now and then, as for instance when we discuss what to write in an essay titled ‘Teenagers should be given more freedom’, or ‘Parents always know best’. I tell them to think and write in a rational, balanced manner, taking note of what keeps happening in the real world, so most of them agree with me that though parents may as a rule have their children’s best interests at heart, that is not a universal truism – many parents can be very bad parents – and even the most well-intentioned parents may not always know what is good for their children (like mothers who never allow their children to go out to play, and ply them constantly with junk food), and some even give highly anti-social lessons to their children (‘always put your self-interest above those of others, never share your notes!’), which goes a long way to making anti-social adults of the next generation. Then there are stories in which we actually have to read about very stupid or nasty or indifferent parents, such as when we discuss David Copperfield’s guardians, or Harry Potter’s – and there was this story by Mrinal Pande called Girls in the ICSE syllabus some years ago which showed how women in the household can oppress girl children, and, in the current syllabus, how Jessica in The Merchant of Venice hates her father Shylock for being a cold-hearted, money-grubbing monster, or Hans Christian Andersen’s story The Little Match Girl, where the beggar child freezing on the street doesn’t dare to go home because her father will beat her if she doesn’t bring any money, or the woman in T. S. Arthur’s story An Angel in Disguise who died of a stroke as a result of ‘idleness, vice and intemperance’, and who took so little care of her children that the neighbours agreed the children would be better off in a poor house. Yes, while dealing with such things, I do rub it in that just giving birth to children doesn’t qualify you as a good parent; you have to achieve that status through much learning and very hard work. When I am doing that, I am trying to make a better generation of parents for the future: I am saying ‘respect’ should not be taken for granted as an automatic privilege, it must be earned. Isn’t that a big part of what a teacher is supposed to do?

Also, I have heard all my life about real-life parents who scald their children with hot irons or throw knives and cleavers at them as a way of ‘disciplining’ them – the wonder is that in this country most children grow up to forget such horrors, or forgive their parents, or come round to believing that that is indeed the right way to bring up children. Now while I do NOT believe in pampering children – my daughter has been brought up under a pretty strict regimen of do’s and don’ts – I have also always believed that such creatures are not parents but perverts, and should be locked away: most people in this country might not know this, but they indeed are, or their children are taken away to foster care, in all civilized countries. My own daughter has been taught ever since she became capable of thinking that if your father behaves like a monster, he stops deserving respect as a father; treat him like the monster he is. Aren’t we all aware that in this country lots of parents are spendthrifts or irresponsible drunks, many parents sell off their girl children or marry them off underage or force them into early labour, and other horrors too awful to mention? Whom are we fooling when we pretend not to know such things? What kind of future India are we building by telling our children that they should ‘respect’ us regardless of our faults and crimes – indeed, that it is forbidden to even think that we, being parents, can have any faults at all? Aren’t many of the millions of criminals in jail right now parents too? Should they, too, be respected?

And there is something else that I try to teach my youngsters in this connection – that ‘respect’ involves courtesy and consideration, though never unthinking deference and obedience. I see too little of courtesy and consideration from youngsters to their elders in this country, within the family and outside: evidently that is not what they are ‘taught’ at home or in school. In many countries, young people are taught much better to yield a seat in the bus or train to any elderly person, not just to their own parents, not to push ahead of them in queues or shove them aside while walking, not to use loud and vulgar language in the presence of much older folk. I wish our parents and so-called teachers tried teaching such good manners. I should, if I like to think of myself as a gentleman (or woman), treat all elders with courtesy and consideration, even while not listening to everything they say, when I know they are saying foolish or wrong things, as they sometimes do. Isn’t that something we elders should try to teach our young more strenuously?

So yes, though I do not bring up such issues unless we are doing something directly connected to the syllabus and question papers they would have to face, I do indeed talk in a rational, factual, un-hypocritical way about parents and children and what the ideal relationship between them should be like. Some children, I hope, learn good lessons from me, some don’t; some parents know and approve, some don’t: I really don’t care, because I have the backing of the best authorities, philosophical, legal and pedagogical, behind me as well as my own conscience; it has never hurt my professional interest, and you can’t teach an old dog new tricks – this is the way I have worked all my life, this is the way I shall go on working till the end, cocking a snook at all my pathetic detractors.

But I have a theory about why insistence upon blind parent-worship is so strong in this country. Shall I tell you?

Well, let me save it for  a future blogpost…