Education has always been the foundation of any progressive and developed society. Ancient India was one of the most developed nations and had its educational foundation in world-renowned higher educational universities like Takshila, Nalanda, Vikramshila, Vallabhi, Nagarjuna, Jaggadala, and Kanthaloor university spread across the sub-continent. The school education in the form of Gurukul systems imparted vocational knowledge in a wide range of subjects like scriptures, medicine, warfare, and philosophy, among others. Scholars and students from affluent communities of civilisations across the globe flooded our schools and colleges for education.
What could have been the most desired aspect of our education system that made them travel across continents and oceans? Was it the splendid infrastructure or the Gurus who imparted knowledge in these knowledge sanctuaries? It had to be the Gurus who pursued knowledge for most of their life before imparting it as a teacher.
Modern Education system originated two centuries back along with the Industrial Revolution to provide a skilled workforce to an economy fuelled by industrialisation. After a little more than 200 years of its existence, it is an undisputed fact that current education system is not relevant and does more harm than support the 21st Century world of technology, innovation, and the boundary-less planet.
If you are a passionate follower of educational reforms in our country or across the world, you may agree with me that we need our ancient Gurus back, but to impart knowledge and skill relevant in 21st century and we may need millions of them. We need them because their teaching and learning methodology was not restricted to gaining information but correlating it with life and understanding its practical application.
If this must be the mainstay of our education, then changing the mindset of present-day educators epitomise the secret formula for achieving the desired outcome. Educators today have been part of a system for far too long, which practised facets of education like rote learning, evaluating and judging student capability on marks rather than their intelligence and abilities which create an unjustified burden on students. As a result, creative thinkers in class become inattentive and unproductive, which results in them being labelled as underachievers despite their creativity. Moreover, the pressure of scoring marks makes them underperform, thereby leading them to depression or frustration in life. Imagine the paradox, our kids, and we are in an era where schools kill the creativity in us and later, we join the industry as a workforce which today pays huge incentives to people with creative and innovative minds. In fact, there is a war going out there for acquiring talent which has not been destroyed by our education system.
As a parent, I do not want my kids to go through this diabolically ironical experience in life. Education reform activists, forward-thinking scholars and 21st-century academicians will eventually convince governments to bring out policies for much-needed reforms. But WHO, HOW and by doing WHAT will we transform millions of our educators into being new age Chanakya, Dronacharya, Aristotle or Socrates? We have likes of Rajesh Kumar Sharma, Abdul Malik, Babar Ali, Aravind Gupta, Roshni Mukherjee, Vimala Kaul and Bharati Kumari. But they are not enough; we need millions.
The 21st-century classroom needs to be vastly different from the 20th-century classroom. The evolving role of teachers and they being instructional trendsetters in the new realm of requirements is inevitable for the students to be the creators of what they want to learn, how they want to learn it, while the learning process is effectively ensured.
Transforming millions of our current teachers cannot be achieved by merely putting them through certifications and training. There is a lot that we could accomplish as a nation if we could tweak our education system to include a little creativity and progressive thinking suited to a person’s individual growth and requirements. But it is the desperate need of the hour to provide targeted interventions for transforming educators.
Hence it is the undisputed requirement of the present generation that teachers be open to the needs of the changing trends in modern education. But are the teachers willing to transform themselves? We cannot expect them to be Dronacharya if we do not have the heart of Ekalavya, so what is the Guru Dakshina we are willing to pay them?
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