“Education – for sale”

Arun Bangotra
Indian cultural history is said to be richest in the world. Teachers were given the status of God and worshipped by their students. The relationship between teachers and students is very beautifully described in our cultural history. Teachers are called Gurus in India. Ideally, Guru is the one who lightens the path in darkness of life. He is responsible for overall development of his disciples. He educates students in all aspects of life, be it academics, sports, moral education, social education or spiritual. He moulds his disciples into disciplined personalities and instils them with a lot of positivity. He is the one to whom a student can surrender his/her entire life. This obviously means that India has had the presence of such great Gurus like Sandeepni (Guru of Lord Krishna), Dronacharya (Guru of Pandavas), Ramkrishna Paramhansa (Guru of Swami Vivekananda), etc. Thus, their disciples were also devoted towards them.
But with changing times, teaching has predominantly changed to a money making business and teachers in a way have changed to cheaters. One can see that the transition from the word teacher to a cheater is merely a rearrangement of words. Is this just a coincidence? It may or may not be. But a lot larger proportion of teachers today are too focussed on monetary part involved in the profession. Monetary in itself is not bad, what’s wrong is the approach to get it. They are hardly bothered about the future of their students. As a result, the land of great Gurus has turned into land of fraud teachers.
The teachers collect huge amounts of money from students in the name of giving coaching for JKCET, IIT/JEE, GATE, CAT etc. But they provide nothing really to students. Nowadays, tuitions have become a trend. Such teachers teach nothing in school or colleges and make it an obligation for students to take tuitions from them, whether they can afford it or not. These teachers or I should say cheaters also help students in cheating during exams by taking bribes from them. They also make money by making it an obligation on students to buy the books which they have referred because in return they get commission from the publishers. The trend is rapidly increasing from small cities like Jammu to education hubs like Delhi. This practice is spoiling future of many brilliant students.
But one thing that needs to be understood here is that teachers themselves alone are not responsible for such dissolution of our education system. Teachers and parents have an equal role to play here. It’s the parents’ responsibility to look into whether their ward is genuinely in need of extra guidance in the form of coaching classes or whether that is in a way made a compulsion by the professor. Especially in those cases where a teacher in school and the one for coaching class is same, it’s a very transparent signal to get suspicious. In fact, it’s the parent’s responsibility to make their child conscious about such trends in advance so that these scenarios, as they arise, can be countered. In recent past many scams has unearthed where peoples are making fake caste certificates and illegally guiding students’ selection in different university and different institutes by charging Rs. 3 – 5 lakhs per seat. This shows the kind of pro-activeness HRD Ministry has shown to monitor and keep in check scrupulous activities while at the same time fostering the process of improvement in the Indian Education system.
So, it can well be said that in an urgency of minting money, Indians are losing their moral values and respect for their esteemed culture. We should not encourage such malpractices and in fact, work to bring to light such issues so that only the real Gurus are respected and allowed to function. Moreover with the proliferation of educational institutes charging hefty fees for vocational courses, students seem to be more concerned about higher salary packages and cushy jobs after getting popular degree or diploma rather than acquiring quality education to serve the society. The entry of private players has opened new avenues in education but it has also led to commercialisation of Indian education system. Ironically the purpose of education has been reduced to merely acquiring a certificate which can help in getting a job with high income. The rush for short-cuts to achieve economic prosperity has pushed moral values into background. Students with idealism and welfare intentions are discouraged by teachers, friends and family. Education has become highly remunerative business and it thrives on raising income expectations of students. What, if not education, is the tool to overcome the rising social evils, mainly exploitation of marginalised and weaker sections for personal gain?
The commercialization of education, carried out by global corporations, is the practice of altering or disrupting the teaching and learning process in schools from kindergarten through college, by introducing advertising and other commercial activities in order to increase profit. Corporations claim, with great fanfare, that they are ‘community partners’ bringing needed resources to underfunded schools and helping students get the things that legislators can’t or won’t provide. In reality, through tax loopholes and lobbying, corporations have themselves defunded education. In-School marketers have made it clear that they intend to infiltrate and use public schools as a vehicle for reaching a captive audience. Their stated goal is to brand children as early as possible to consume their clients’ products.
The most sacred and the most important job in the world is that of the teacher. A teacher, hidden in the shadow of the student, must guide him to move ahead and resurrect our broken society. From the time when education started its first phase of commercialisation, the responsibilities of the teacher too, have been compromised. It is painful to note that people are beginning to view it as just another job which pays them and feeds them. When a person graduates, more often than not, the last job that he/she applies for is the job of the teacher. While we are a society built with the bricks of fallacies concrete of misguided principles, the notion, that the job of a teacher is a lesser one, filled with so much ignorance and falsity. Teachers are pillars of society which are helping in the training of human minds makes a man a right thinker and a correct decision-maker. A person who gets a good education will become a more dependable worker, a better citizen, and more important a great Human being. Einstein once said, “Education is that what remains after one has forgotten what one has learnt in school.” If what he said is true, none of us of the present generation have ever had education!
(The author is Principal Government Polytechnic, Udhampur)

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