Hiring for beggars... sorry, teachers!

First, Bankura University and then Viswabharati have posted situations vacant ads for teachers to be hired on contract (meaning on a purely temporary basis with no benefits) at ridiculous salaries - a couple of hundred rupees per class, ten to twenty classes per month - which have raised a brief storm on the internet. Now I find that storm rather disingenuous, if not downright dishonest and silly. 

It has been true for a long, long time that, along with paying lip service to teaching as a 'noble' profession which 'builds the nation', we have always looked down on real-life teachers and paid them a pittance in terms of both money and respect. There is no better proof of this than the fact that many of the teachers who taught my grandfather's generation had to live like beggars and were never consulted by policymakers on anything that could mean 'nation-building', and many bright young people of my father's generation gave up teaching jobs for better ones in business and industry simply to make a tolerable living. Then, around the turn of the century, teachers' salaries - much more for college teachers than schoolteachers, though - were somewhat improved, but far from enough to attract the brightest and most dedicated to this profession, as I have seen all my working life as a teacher: hardly any of my good students have even considered teaching as an option, especially teaching in school, where, as I hold, 90% of all that is truly vital in education is imparted (as all the greatest minds, including Tagore, Russell and Vivekananda have agreed). I myself gave up the schoolteacher's job quite simply because the pay was so poor that without the option of private tuition on the side, I would have faced poverty after retirement.

Now what has been happening over the last at least four decades is that the set image of teaching as a relatively 'easy', unchallenging and 'secure' job which nevertheless offers some 'bhodrolok' status at the lower end of the scale (as opposed to, say, truck drivers who might earn much more but are 'chhotolok') has drawn vast numbers of the absolute dregs of humanity into this profession. Those who were simply no good for anything else, those who were laziest, least knowledgeable, least committed and most clueless became teachers by the hundred thousand (I am speaking a very inconvenient and unpalatable truth here, but truth it is). Add to that the fact that in millions of middle class families, schoolteaching has been considered one of the few 'safe' and 'permissible' jobs for females, and anyone who had a master's degree, however worthless, could become one, if only one could flatter and bribe the right people. Makes for a ghastly mix, doesn't it? The results are there for all to see, so I won't belabour them, but the fact remains that no one addresses the elephant in the room: the fact that private tuition has become near-universal and is considered absolutely essential right from middle school if not earlier for anyone who can afford it. I have been saying this publicly for a long time now - those who can teach become private tutors, those who cannot stay in school.

Nothing suddenly shocking is happening now; things are merely touching a nadir. Imagine: the job advertisers are confident that they are going to find enough young people with master's degrees who have cleared the NET or got a PhD  and are eager to fill those pathetic posts, 'teaching' jobs which bring in less than my driver and my cook make. (Meanwhile it has now become common knowledge that countless young people are openly bribing officials for jobs in government schools or working in private schools for sums that are too pitiful to be openly mentioned). Then imagine, how low the self-esteem of those job applicants must be, how little their confidence in their own knowledge and ability, how desperate their desire for a 'safe' and 'respectable' job, how lacking in ambition they are, that they would deign even to think of applying for such jobs. And then imagine what kind of teachers they will make, what they will do for and to their students! It gives me nightmares...

You could read this post in tandem with an older one, What price education? which I notice has just come into the most-read list again. And my profoundest salutations and apologies to those truly dedicated souls, few and far between as they are, who continue to give of their best as good teachers, despite the humiliation and privation lifelong. I have never been able to figure out what makes them tick: committed to doing my work to the best of my ability as I have always been, I have also been entirely professional about it, always. I teach because it feeds my family decently.