UNESCO celebrates World Teachers’ Day on 5 October every year, since 1994, to recognise the role of teachers in creating human intellectual heritage. This year’s theme is “recasting teaching as a collaborative profession”, which highlights the potential of mutual support, shared expertise, and joint responsibility in education for the wellsprings of civilisation. Certainly, the teacher-student relationship is a priceless treasure. However, the teacher, the state, and society need to collaborate to acquire shared expertise and collectively take responsibility for laying the groundwork for future generations.
In Pakistan, teachers want reverence, financial and job security, and advanced professional training. By ‘professional training’, I mean to enable teachers to be empirically and technologically informed, critically rational, and creative researchers who themselves can conduct genuine research and teach their students the art of doing research and pursuing truth. If the teaching profession is not developed in the country, a Sisyphean social downfall is inevitable.
Certainly, teachers are the torchbearers who enlighten humanity with knowledge, wisdom, and rationality. In Pakistan, the teaching profession has been neglected for decades. Now, most people prefer to join money-spinning and socially ‘status’ acknowledged professions, such as bureaucracy and the judiciary. Teaching is not only a profession but a mission that needs attention from society and the state.
Teachers deserve reverence from society and the state because they cultivate the minds of the youth to think well and the art of living well. Aristotle, the great Greek philosopher, states, “Those who educate children well are more to be honoured than they who produce them; for these only gave them life, those the art of living well”. Aristotle rightly holds that one who educates students deserves more honour than those who give them life.
An ideal teacher not only creates interest in the students in their subjects but also teaches them how to live a good life. Bertrand Russell believes that a teacher should help students to enhance their creative potential. A good teacher inspires but does not mould the minds of the students. In an essay, “Education as a Political Institution” (1916), Russell creates an interesting analogy of a teacher and a pupil with a potter and clay. A teacher, like a potter who handles the clay with tenderness for making pottery, nurtures the creative impulse in the pupil with a spirit of reverence to completely develop human capabilities. In contrast, if the creative impulses of students are not cultivated properly, they will become vulnerable members of society.
Ideal teachers do not undermine human potential in their students, but cultivate it to create the power of creativity, rationality, and mental autonomy
Russell believes that a reverent teacher envisages the creative potential in the pupil as “something sacred, indefinable, unlimited, something individual and strongly precious, [and] the growing principle of life….” These creative impulses, which are generally called potentials, capacities, or capabilities, can be either nurtured or destroyed. When these human potentials, ‘the growing principles of life,’ find a proper channel to grow in promising hands, like the tender hands of a potter making a vase, personalities are born who make history. Human history reveals that great teachers create great minds; for instance, Isaac Newton, Albert Einstein, and Abdus Salam are the products of their great teachers. So, ideal teachers do not undermine human potential in their students, but cultivate it to create the power of creativity, rationality, and mental autonomy.
There is always an organic connection between politics and education. Education can be used as a political tool for oppression or liberation. Brazilian philosopher Paulo Freire’s classic work, Pedagogy of the Oppressed (1968), critically analyses the traditional educational system, arguing that it propagates oppression by supporting the existing power dynamics between the ‘oppressor’ and the ‘oppressed’. Freire calls this system ‘the banking concept of education’ in which the teacher acts as a depositor of knowledge into the passive account (mind) of the student. The deposited knowledge is considered a static gift from a teacher to the student. This educational system oppressed the students with the pedagogy of the oppressors through the teachers who serve their interests. In contrast, critically rational teachers do not become political tools but always try to pursue the truth and teach the same to their students.
Now, let us think about how we can develop our teaching profession to meet the challenges of the 21st century. How can the teaching profession be improved in Pakistan? Why do people not prefer to join the teaching profession in Pakistan? There are numerous reasons for the decadence of the teaching profession in Pakistan:
First, financial insecurity is one of the major factors that people are losing interest in the teaching profession. Let us try to understand how the disparity between the teaching profession and other professions has been created. There was a uniform basic pay scale (BPS) system for all professions in the country. Now, all the professions, except for education, including civil service, judiciary, police, parliamentarians, and employees of civil secretaries, are given abundant special lucrative allowances. Only the teaching fraternity earnestly depends upon BPS, without any additional allowances. Is it a conscious effort to keep this fraternity hand-to-mouth?
Teaching is a collaborative profession that needs society and the state for its social recognition, financial protection, job security, and professional training
Moreover, hundreds of vacancies in schools and colleges are filled by temporary teaching positions, with hardly six-month contracts, and at very low salaries. Without job security, there is no concept of quality education. Teachers in private sector institutions are, literally, treated like factory workers. On top of all, thousands of public schools and colleges are being outsourced rapidly, leading to the displacement of both male and female teachers from their hometowns to far-flung areas. In these perils, teachers are also assigned additional responsibilities, such as elections and the dengue eradication drive. Teachers are intellectuals, not social workers. This seems to have been done consciously so that bright minds could not join the teaching profession. If we want people to prefer the teaching profession, job security should be ensured, and the financial package should be increased at least twice as much as in other professions.
Second, in Pakistan, we could not develop proper academies of professional training for teachers, as is done for bureaucrats, judges, police officers, and others. The world is unprecedentedly changing in this age of artificial intelligence. If we fail to prepare our generation for the future, we cannot compete with the world. To prepare our generation for the future, we need to empower our teachers, equipped with advanced pedagogical methods, well-informed with scientific and technological advancements. Without proper training of the teachers, we cannot move forward as a nation and meet the challenges of the world. There is a dire need to establish training academies for all levels of teaching: school, college, and university.
Third, the teaching profession needs social, cultural, and state support. In society, the profession of teaching has less recognition than other professions, such as civil service, judiciary, revenue, and police. All these professions are the products of the teaching profession. In advanced countries, both society and state recognise teachers and treat them with dignity. The advancement of these countries depends upon the labour of their teachers, whom they pay with reverence and with the best possible salary packages. In developing countries, including Pakistan, for instance, most people aspire to join the civil service because being a civil servant has more cultural and social acceptance.
Indeed, the future of every country is in the hands of teachers. Suppose we want to make our country progressive. In that case, we need to empower our teaching profession, granting autonomy to educational institutions, job security, and financial incentives, including special allowances and reliefs, such as tax rebates to all teachers and researchers. The state should promote the autonomy of educational institutions, without any political interference. The teaching profession cannot be improved without the collaboration among teachers, society, and the state, for the better future of the country.
To sum up, teaching is a collaborative profession that needs society and the state for its social recognition, financial protection, job security, and professional training. This can only be possible when education is our priority, and we make pro-education policies, implement academic practices, and create conducive environments for students and teachers to uphold shared expertise and joint responsibility for the greater interest of the country.