One of the constant challenges I face in my present job as Director of a high school in New Delhi is the severe shortage of talented and motivated teachers in the school. Despite holding several rounds of interviews and offering high salaries, I come face to face only with those individuals who have barely passed their high school exams, who have floundered through university tests and who have little or no previous record of social work, but who are now suddenly keen to teach children in my classrooms.
At one such interview, I turned towards our education advisor, a retired Director of Education with the Indian government.
"Why are we only receiving applications from such mediocre applicants?" I asked him, thoroughly bewildered and somewhat concerned that we may be doing something grossly incorrect.
"Why!" he laughed, "why would anyone who is more than mediocre want to be a teacher in the first place?"
Despite their intended humor, his words struck me sharply. Not only did they answer my immediate question regarding the quality of teaching staff in majority of schools and universities in India, they offered a wider explanation to what might be grossly wrong with India's system of educating its future leaders.
I remember my days as a college student in New York University, where many of my class-mates and friends had taken up part-time jobs or borrowed large sums of money to pay their way through college. What surprised me was that several such students were not pursuing degrees in business, engineering or medicine--commonly regarded as the only three disciplines worth studying for in India--but were following their passions in disciplines like social work, education or literature. The idea that someone could work so hard and sacrifice so much to study something which they truly enjoyed rather than something which offered them a cozy pay-package boggled me. It was something I had never encountered back home in India.
As I started to volunteer in local schools and NGO's in the Manhattan area, I noticed the talented and motivated individuals running such schools and organizations. Many held advanced degrees in education from prestigious universities like Harvard, Columbia and Stanford. Many had left their corporate perches to dedicate time to teaching under-privileged children. And many had ambitious ideas for how they could further the cause of rural minorities and inner-city communities in the city's schools. I was amazed at the positive energy and enthusiasm that circulated in such schools. Why were such people not running schools back home? Why had I never encountered such people as a school student?
Even outside educational institutes, I observed how passionate my friends were for working with the government or for leading community service projects. One of my friends wanted to use her deep understanding of Latin American cultures to work with the Ministry of External Affairs; another wanted to study developmental economics and trade by working with a fair-trade organization in India. This interest in public-service positions by highly intelligent students was alien to my mind, where only those professions earning boat-loads of money were considered respectable. I knew that India did not have a shortage of smart and motivated people. It was somehow unable to channel these people into public serving jobs. I wondered what the reason might be.
Having observed leading schools in India, I have found very few promoting a spirit of public-service and social-work. Yes, many schools carry lofty mottos like "Service before self" or "Leading Society", but how exactly do they fulfill such promises? There is barely any focus on social work. Students are not exposed to social organizations or creative careers. Instead, students and teachers seem to be stuck in a rat-race to send as many students to IIT's as possible. In my own school, the sheer pressure to succeed in academics and score high grades dilutes any interests students might have in volunteering or learning outside the traditional curriculum. Is it a wonder that the meat of our talent ends up in call centers or multi-nationals instead of in schools or NGO's?
Even in schools promoting a social message and encouraging students to pursue their interests in the humanities or education, there is a strong social stigma against taking up non-business or non-engineering courses. A few days back we had parents of prospective students in my school inquiring how many students we had placed in medical and engineering colleges. This was a number they would keenly scrutinize across schools in the area--obviously, the school with the highest number of admissions received the admiring interest and the much-needed funding of the parents, leaving little room for the school to foster interests in the humanities, social work or education.
There is also a strong stigma against students learning politics or literature, most of whom are regarded as nincompoops. There is an interesting rule of thumb in schools in India: A-scoring students must choose science subjects, B-scoring students go in for business studies and students scoring below B choose the Arts since it is perceived to be the easiest to score high grades in. There is strong pressure on students from teachers as well as parents to choose career paths based not on interest or talent but rather on how smart a kid is. For a sharp kid to go in for a major in history is considered sheer sacrilege.
While the past decade has propelled India as a major economic powerhouse, I see little change in the country's collective attitude towards educating its public-leaders. This worries me: for while frothy stock-markets and over-crowded call-centers may have served India well over the past few years, only well-educated, motivated and enigmatic leaders can pilot the country towards sustainable development in the coming years. The problem, as exemplified in my teacher interviews, is the acute shortage of such leaders immediately and the lack of educational and societal measures to provide such leaders in the near future.
I've been wondering since a long time how a deeply ingrained educational system can quickly be turned around to encourage public service. Though government laws are now being drafted to reduce rote-learning and emphasize more creative thinking in school curricula, it could be years before such laws trickle down to the bedrock of everyday student-teacher interactions.
Instead, I feel the answer lies with efforts at the micro-level. We need schools that can provide excellent resources to painters, musicians and sports-persons, even at a loss to their bottom-lines. We need young entrepreneurs to setup NGO's promoting education as a career. We need quality college-level programs in government and social work, even if the short-term costs of maintaining such programs exceed their immediate monetary benefits. More than anything else, we need to ask ourselves who we would like to govern our country and who we would like to teach our kids in school.
I remember my days in the financial services sector where my colleagues and I would skim through countless resumes of highly talented and intelligent job applicants and end up shortlisting one candidate. With hefty reforms in the Indian education sector underway and with individual efforts cropping up from time to time, the day when such a system of choosing teachers and Principals becomes norm rather than exception are not far away. It is up to people like you and me to usher in tomorrow's new band of leaders.
