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Important teachers’ responsibility on the wane

31 October 2009

The scenario is quite familiar. It is time of festivity and tshechu. The school principal has granted a three-day holiday to the children. Tenzin rushes home, smile on his face. But his joy doesn’t get far. “Study first, tshechu later,” it is his mother’s authoritative tone. “Remember, you still need to work your way to the top.” Crestfallen and helpless, the child relents.
Years roll by and he assumes that books come before everything. He indeed works very hard and by the dint of his ability, he becomes one of the key position holders in the civil service. The only drawback with him, and a major one, is that he hates anything static.
Temples mean only a handful of idols, obviously failing to appreciate the 2500 year-old philosophy of Buddha who peered into the heart of the universe. Culture bores him. What impresses him is the dazzle and the global culture of short term materialism.
Sounds irrational but the fault does not lie with Tenzin alone. It is the price that his mother has to pay for not letting her son to be culturally aware. It is the penalty the system must stomach for putting too much emphasis on examinations. It is a serious repercussion the society must savour for upholding a myopic definition of education. At the heart of this parody, is the age-old nature-nurture debate couched in parenting children in up-to-date terms. What do parents and society want anyway – education or just literacy? There have been and there will be teachers whose sole anxiety is to see their students fairing well in examinations.
So they keep teaching and parents keep pressing their children to study harder. The result – universities keep churning out graduates with heads and hearts of robots. There have been and there will be teachers, too, whose concern is not only to transmit knowledge and skills but also transform their students into better human beings. These teachers, for instance, teach their children not only to enjoy the rhythm of poetry or thrills of novel, but also to reflect, to adjust and to change. Such students have ‘heads that think’ and ‘hearts that feel’. And that is the crux of the matter. What really matters is how a person puts together the alphabets and numbers in life – whether he or she chooses to use alphabets for declaration of war or for restoration of peace.
Of course “the role of the teacher is changing,” as Sing and Sudarshan (1996) rightly put it, “changing so fast that no amount of pre-service or in-service education can cope with the expectations of the society.” But that is not an excuse to raise culturally dead literates.
Driglam Namzhag, Thadamtshig, Lay Jumdrel, Zacha Dro Sum and Driglam Choe Sum, reflect our culture and speak volumes in terms of history and tradition.
Folk tales, ancient temples, traditional songs and dances depict a lot of history too, and all of them must be safe-guarded, not in museums, but in the ordinary walks of Bhutanese people. It is the responsibility of the teachers, therefore, to arouse curiosity of the children and make them value the beauty of being unique while equally striving to meet the challenges of escalating world. It is the teacher’s duty to build their character, nurture their dreams and put a sense of humanity in their souls, not just indoctrinate a set of rigid rules into their heads.
Some argue that attitudes are learnt incidentally rather than preplanned instructions. But many agree that teachers play a vital role in shaping the young minds of the children. It is the job of the teacher to train a child in a way he or she should go, and if that is done, he or she is worthy to be called a transformation teacher. Certainly such a person deserves the nation’s salute for his or her worthy accomplishment in the crucible of Teaching for Change.

The scenario is quite familiar. It is time of festivity and tshechu. The school principal has granted a three-day holiday to the children. Tenzin rushes home, smile on his face. But his joy doesn’t get far. “Study first, tshechu later,” it is his mother’s authoritative tone. “Remember, you still need to work your way to the top.” Crestfallen and helpless, the child relents.

Years roll by and he assumes that books come before everything. He indeed works very hard and by the dint of his ability, he becomes one of the key position holders in the civil service. The only drawback with him, and a major one, is that he hates anything static.

Temples mean only a handful of idols, obviously failing to appreciate the 2500 year-old philosophy of Buddha who peered into the heart of the universe. Culture bores him. What impresses him is the dazzle and the global culture of short term materialism.

Sounds irrational but the fault does not lie with Tenzin alone. It is the price that his mother has to pay for not letting her son to be culturally aware. It is the penalty the system must stomach for putting too much emphasis on examinations. It is a serious repercussion the society must savour for upholding a myopic definition of education. At the heart of this parody, is the age-old nature-nurture debate couched in parenting children in up-to-date terms. What do parents and society want anyway – education or just literacy? There have been and there will be teachers whose sole anxiety is to see their students fairing well in examinations.

So they keep teaching and parents keep pressing their children to study harder. The result – universities keep churning out graduates with heads and hearts of robots. There have been and there will be teachers, too, whose concern is not only to transmit knowledge and skills but also transform their students into better human beings. These teachers, for instance, teach their children not only to enjoy the rhythm of poetry or thrills of novel, but also to reflect, to adjust and to change. Such students have ‘heads that think’ and ‘hearts that feel’. And that is the crux of the matter. What really matters is how a person puts together the alphabets and numbers in life – whether he or she chooses to use alphabets for declaration of war or for restoration of peace.

Of course “the role of the teacher is changing,” as Sing and Sudarshan (1996) rightly put it, “changing so fast that no amount of pre-service or in-service education can cope with the expectations of the society.” But that is not an excuse to raise culturally dead literates.

Driglam Namzhag, Thadamtshig, Lay Jumdrel, Zacha Dro Sum and Driglam Choe Sum, reflect our culture and speak volumes in terms of history and tradition.

Folk tales, ancient temples, traditional songs and dances depict a lot of history too, and all of them must be safe-guarded, not in museums, but in the ordinary walks of Bhutanese people. It is the responsibility of the teachers, therefore, to arouse curiosity of the children and make them value the beauty of being unique while equally striving to meet the challenges of escalating world. It is the teacher’s duty to build their character, nurture their dreams and put a sense of humanity in their souls, not just indoctrinate a set of rigid rules into their heads.

Some argue that attitudes are learnt incidentally rather than preplanned instructions. But many agree that teachers play a vital role in shaping the young minds of the children. It is the job of the teacher to train a child in a way he or she should go, and if that is done, he or she is worthy to be called a transformation teacher. Certainly such a person deserves the nation’s salute for his or her worthy accomplishment in the crucible of Teaching for Change.

By Dorji Wangchuk

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