Blog: Teaching Profession - The Collapse

The leader of a Primary School Teachers' Union would wish to have a police post in every primary school. The President of the Secondary Teachers' Union wants to reintroduce caning as a fit measure to combat violence in schools. You realise that you are far away from the noble elegance, rich empathetic capacity, and civilised behaviour of an educated guide and mentor.

The profession has not been demeaned; it is the quality of man that makes the professional that is inferior. It has become second nature to use violence to respond to violence. Gandhi's non-violence, the Christian idea that 'Revenge is not thine', the works of Mandela and Martin Luther King are decoratives to varnish speeches because man has abandoned the virtues of understanding, turned his back to patience and the elevating strength of suffering.

And yet the world should not be painted black. Dr Mahmood Kureemun launched a book on Wednesday 5 October 'L'homme au coeur d'or' to pay tribute not only to his brother, late Mr Cassam Kureemun, the reputed union leader, but also to honour all his teachers on the auspicious occasion of Teachers' Day. This event took place at the Municipality of Port-Louis and the touching ceremony reminded me that at the base of the relationship between teacher and pupil lies the sacred feeling of gratitude. One does not necessarily teach another the virtue of gratitude. The 'thank you' that you tell your child to say for a gift is related to the gift. The average Mauritian youth at school thinks it is his right to obtain what he gets. Gratitude is an act of memory that time cannot kill. Our parents have been poor role models and they have perverted the nature itself of value-based relationship. Gratitude gives a silver lining of sacredness to an act of giving and taking and binds the taker eternally to the giver. One cannot afford to forget the person who has done an act of generosity towards you. How does one cultivate this spirit? In fact it is cultivated by recognising the divine in the other, by accepting that no one will ever do anything for you unless he has seen the sacred in you.

Dr Kureemun's ceremony on Teachers' Day convened persons who taught him when he was in Form 4. He learnt at their hands till he completed his HSC. This gratitude is not a ritualistic act done to absolve oneself of a debt. There is no debt in gratitude.

Our society has lost it. Is it the fault of parents only? No! Every profession today welcomes the ragtag and bobtail, the commoner, the loveless and indifferent, the one devoid of flame and flat without the instinct for self transcendence. Such people dilute the nature of the profession. When the demotivated, loveless seniors meet the new recruits who are inventive, passionate and enthusiastic, they are able to convert them into embittered bureaucrats who count their sick leaves, casual leaves and exhaust all other leaves because the employer is seen as a leviathan ready to exploit them. You then realise that the profession can keep only a few intact with the primal passion that ignited them at the beginning of their career.

There are doctors of medicine who find in-patients exploitable materials. Some charge cardiac patients Rs 1,000 for a simple stress test. What does the teacher do? Both at primary and secondary the child is seen as material for self-aggrandisement. It is too easy to blame the system by saying the curriculum is too heavy. What have we done whenever opportunities have arisen to reform the curriculum? These garrulous, belligerent union leaders who speak for themselves like to take a backseat when their contribution is required as stakeholders. It is not the system that is faulty. It is the way we service the system that is at fault. The lucrative aspect has not been tempered by the professional urgency to help the child, whoever he is, to effectively learn. The teacher has lopsidedly make use of the system to defeat it and cause it to favour the best. It is like goddess Luxmi chasing goddess Saraswati.

At a certain time the official, that which involved the welfare of the many, carried the stamp of the inviolable like the vault of a bank. Confidentiality had the seal of a lifetime secrecy known to a few and inaccessible to the commoner.  Democratisation has broken barriers, burnt sacred gods to the happiness of the many. The sacred became cheap and everybody could purchase it and make his own use of it, at times perverted uses. The leader and the led became tainted with the same stain….greed. Thus the doctor forgot the Hippocratic Oath and served himself before all. The Chief Executive Officer became the prime thief and caused the crash of Enron, Satyam and other big companies. Can you imagine that CEO's in America gave themselves bonuses with the money loaned to them by the state through stimulus packages during the subprime catastrophe? It's a free for all. The world is there for the looting, for plundering and for ransacking.

The teaching profession is not spared. Who says you can't make money decently as a teacher? Are you ready to work hard? To make yourself credible, to know your own incompetence and improve by self-development programmes?

Are you ready to sacrifice pleasure time by waking up at night like a university student and study for personal growth? There are many unprofessional teachers who are making good money by using trade tricks inappropriate for the profession. Such people earn enough to ever want to take pains to study hard. School work and tuitions constitute the whole of their life.

If the teacher is capable of making money out of his profession, he should be ready to give to his profession. What? His undivided attention to children with learning difficulties. If 30% fail CPE every year, this shows the unrelieved selfishness of the teacher for whom only good students matter. Do these teachers have a reading habit? Do they keep abreast of the changes taking place in classroom methods? Do they go out of their way to cultivate their mind with the finest products of intellect in the world? No! That is how the teaching profession becomes a cheapening exercise lacking in nobility, why the teacher is involved in physical violence, becomes its author and victim. Add to this a young generation of spoiled brats who mushroom in homes lacking politeness, culture, tradition of subtlety and you have an explosive mixture in the class. Many intelligent HSC holders will never entertain the hope of becoming teachers because to teach today is to indulge in self abuse.

I publicly thank Dr Kureemun for having remember me as his teacher because he and many other students like him who have grown up under my tutelage give me, through their indelible gratitude, the faith that there may be better times for the profession far from the loud braggarts who call themselves representatives of this noble profession.

PS: I do not think that my former students remember me with gratitude only for the knowledge I gave them of Shakespeare or Keats. I taught them also what has touched their inner being. I've taught them the grammar of the human mind so that they may be strong enough to face calamity; I have taught them the syntax of life so that they do not live with illusions. I taught them about life and human nature so that they might become courageous in the teeth of danger, patient in the face of the buffetings of treacherous existence, strong in adversity. That is why a Steve Jobs became one of the most illustrious innovators of technology without having been a technology wizard. He also like many geniuses dropped out of our traditional school. Steve Jobs must have had his rich potential awakened by means other than the narrowly scholastic.

Bunwaree must think out of the box in order to reform education. And when he does innovate there are so many forces, so many lobbies that will undermine his effort to drag him back to the conventional.