The government of India and the Delhi government celebrated Teachers’ Day by pushing the teacher out of the picture. The president literally took a teacher’s place, teaching a class on political history (or, as he said, his perceptions of it) and the prime minister offering lessons from his life. Clearly conscious of the criticism of his hogging the limelight last year, he explained that he was talking to children on Teachers’ Day because they were representations of a teacher’s work. The prime minister addressed several of them by their names. Their teachers, however, remained nameless.



The prime minister spoke of the pre-eminence of the schoolteacher in the village society he grew up in and the need to restore this status to teachers. Yet, he failed to see the irony of his own actions – he gave the children the right to a face and a name and the teachers only nameless invisibility.



But these nameless folk are at the centre of a crisis in Indian education, which we are to understand is stymieing “Make in India”. The most extreme manifestation of the crisis is in the state school sector, which the majority of Indian children, mostly poor, attend. These folk, tasked with teaching the majority of India’s children how to learn, are universally reviled. There is no question that many teachers (though by no means all) in government schools are not committed to their work or lack the capacity to do it adequately. But the question we never ask is how do they get to be teachers in the first place?



Lower than bureaucrats



We have come to believe that school teaching is something of such low value that “anyone” can be a teacher. The administration of school education reinforces this, with the teacher at the lowest rung of the ladder and the school principal lower in the hierarchy than more than half a dozen non-teaching administrative posts in the education department. Teachers, even the best of them, function with little or no autonomy and are subject to the capricious control of education bureaucrats. Today’s example of this control is the conversion of Teachers’ Day into the day the prime minister meets schoolchildren.



The formal bureaucratised system of recruitment now favours those who are willing to do anything, depending on which exam they manage to pass. Qualifying exams to gain government teaching jobs favour those who are in the “competition” market – primed to endlessly take exams for all kinds of government services. This is a system that sets standards very low and is also easily corrupted. The former Haryana Chief Minister Om Prakash Chautala and his son are in jail because of malpractices in teacher recruitment and Madhya Pradesh’s former technical education minister Laxmikant Sharma was arrested in 2014 for his role in altering the results of a teachers’ recruitment exam conducted by the state government. They are only the ones who have been caught.



Outside the formal government recruitment system too the “anyone can teach” principal prevails. More and more state governments and city corporations are happy to hand over entire sections of government schools to NGOs whose teachers tend to be well-meaning idealists who want to experience teaching in (government) schools before they move on to mostly non-school teaching and non-state sector careers. An example of this is the Teach for India Foundation, which has had over 2,000 fellows who have worked or are working as class teachers in government primary schools, “teaching all subjects that can be taught in English”. Their teaching qualifications are a desire to teach (for a couple of years at least) and a couple of weeks of leadership training and teacher training that familiarises them with the TIF’s pedagogy.



Make teachers visible again



The children featured on the prime minister’s Teachers’ Day show were not from schools with dysfunctional permanent teachers or NGO teachers experimenting with their education. They were all exceptionally high achievers from select government model schools, Kendriya Vidyalayas and private schools. Award winning, confident, often English-speaking, they by and large exemplified what good schooling, combined with social advantage or good luck, can achieve. But their teachers too are at the lowest rungs of the education administration, subject to the decisions of the non-teaching education bureaucracy that looks up to its political masters, rather than down to the people who educate children.



In keeping the teachers off the stage and off the screen of his Teachers’ Day show, by never addressing them directly, by not desiring to learn what they think, how they view schools, teaching and learning, the prime minister reinforced this. In today’s India school teaching is a job of such low value that on the day set aside to honour them, schoolteachers must give way to the children they teach, the best of whom will never become teachers. If the crisis in education has to be addressed this will have to change. Schoolteachers will have to become the respected personages of the prime minister’s childhood. For this to happen they will first have to become visible and worth listening to.



