Happy Teachers day

Ever since India joined the WTO in the early nineties, education was declared a service like
any other service in the county, e.g. banking and insurance, even to be traded globally. The
teachers were rechristened as service providers and students as clients. The current
perspective on growth and education requires universities to fulfil the function of training the
skilled manpower needed by the corporate world, a task hitherto, assigned to ITIs, called the
diploma mills. The more formidable task that higher education needs to fulfill within the
overall context of industrial change and the knowledge economy is a more complex one.
Universities are also cast as engines of socio-economic and technological change, the basic
objective of higher education being to close the technology gap between the developed and
the under developed world. This task can be accomplished only by re-engineering the
university structure as currently constituted to foster a more stimulating research environment
conducive for innovation. This can be achieved only by developing critical faculty: only by
challenging old paradigms can we invent new ones, whether in the field of sciences,
humanities or social sciences.
The greatest damage that the policy prescription entails is the rigid criteria for success. It
stifles innovation and prevents universities from adapting to new challenges. Colleges and
universities can succeed in many different ways. Universities serve the function of
preserving and transmission of knowledge. Extension of knowledge takes place through
organized research. Higher education also fulfills the role of socialization. We might begin
orienting education to the needs of society by cultivating individual talents to social needs:
students may be rank-ordered on the basis of humanism, for instance, as we grade them on
the basis of scholastic tests. In any case, given the knowledge explosion, conveying and
testing information in the academic disciplines is becoming untenable as a core function of
education. Given the current turmoil in society, the greatest need is to restore rationality,
honesty and humanity which cannot be achieved by merely designing new courses if we
continue to push Social Darwinism by rewarding killer instinct by engaging students in cut
throat competition for success like the gladiators. Most of all the system of higher education
must address the question of empowerment of the disadvantaged section of the society. To
develop sensibilities among the students, history, for instance, should not be taught only from
the point of view of the victor. The pupil should linger on the battle field among the
wounded, should be made to feel the plight of the homeless in devastated regions, and should
be made aware of all the cruelties and the injustices for which war affords an opportunity.
(Bertrand Russell)
If education is central to development, teachers cant remain peripheral to society. The
teachers should be resurrected to the position of seers and sages as was the case in the ancient
times, the Hindu Sanskriti, to restore the glory of the nation.