The teaching profession appears to be experiencing a watershed moment worldwide. More and more teachers are quitting the profession, citing various reasons. As the client mentality seeps in, schools become money making machines, treating their staff like disposable commodities, to be hired and fired at the whims of the senior management. The employment contracts drawn up all favour the employer; the employee has no or very little legal rights, which puts them at a disadvantage.
Although most of the hiring is contractual, the permanent employees enjoy very little job security also. Those who have children studying in the same school are in an even weaker position, as they enjoy a substantial discount on the tuition fee in addition to their salaries. Schools tend to exploit and take undue advantage of them, knowing that they have a lot more at stake than other teachers.
As the responsibilities multiply and the workloads increase, salaries can barely keep pace. Schools turn into commercial ventures with dedicated social media and marketing teams to ensure that the institution has an active online presence, the ethos of education has been sacrificed at the altar of commercialism. As we mourn the loss, what lies in store for the individuals associated with this profession? Is there a light at the end of the tunnel?
After all, every child is a blank cheque, waiting to be encashed.
Every school has an online presence; teachers have been turned into entertainers, expected to do whatever it takes to attract the clients, aka the students. As the corporate culture seeps in, educationists are reduced to mere puppets, completely at the mercy of the school. As schools crop up in every nook and corner, the social media and marketing teams go into overdrive, to attract and enroll as many children as possible.
After all, every child is a blank cheque, waiting to be encashed. A number of educational institutions are also encashing their name and have entered the franchising business, charging phenomenal sums from the franchisees, which is another money spinner. Schools are not minting, but printing money, as they turn into factories, churning out students, most of them ill prepared to face the outside world and lacking the skills to do so also.
Are we really training children for the big, bad world outside? Are we equipping them with transferable and basic life skills that will stand them in good stead, once they step into the outside world? Or are we handicapping them through excessive mollycoddling? Pampering and shielding children from the unpleasant consequences of their actions and not holding them accountable for their transgressions, means we are raising a bunch of entitled spoilt brats who will only be a burden on their families, once they grow up.
How do we rectify this? We need to make them realise that every action has an equal and opposite reaction. The school and their parents might overlook their indiscretions but the world will definitely not turn a blind eye or a deaf ear. In fact, parenting is all about making children answerable for their actions and giving them the right values and principles. On a number of occasions, as an educationist, the writer strongly felt that she was expected to parent, rather than teach children, making her question whether teachers were expected to act as surrogate parents of the children they were teaching. Who was responsible for their moral upbringing? The parents or the school?
As parents nowadays are spending a small fortune on their children being educated in private institutions, the expectations are greater. A number of them feel that the schools should be doing everything, keeping in mind the money they charge. Everything includes parenting as well as teaching. Also, respectful or gentle parenting, which has become the norm, is raising a generation, where the children have a huge sense of entitlement.
Instead of doing their utmost to please their clients (after all, they pay the salaries), the individuals associated with this profession should be moulding and training the generations of tomorrow. The work environment should be conducive and a certain degree of autonomy should be awarded to educationists. If schools do not respect their teachers, how do they expect the students to do so?
Pampering and shielding children from the unpleasant consequences of their actions and not holding them accountable for their transgressions, means we are raising a bunch of entitled spoilt brats who will only be a burden on their families, once they grow up.
The majority is treated like the hired help and consequently, most of them are engaging in what people call is silent quitting. They go to work, put in the bare minimum or just enough to get by and have mentally already quit the work place. On a number of occasions, the writer would hear teachers say, itnay main itna hi milta hai or yeh naukri to ab dehari lagti hai.
The expectations are humongous; they are expected to keep everybody happy, while treating the children with kid gloves, in an effort not to upset them. This, of course, comes at the cost of their sanity and their mental and emotional health. Buried under mountains of paperwork, the majority has no time to do what they were hired for, that is, teach. Their primary responsibility is towards the children but instead, most of the teachers are walking on egg shells, doing their best to get through the day and hang on to their jobs, which is even more important if their children are enrolled in the same institution.
As supply exceeds demand, the teachers have zero bargaining power and fresh graduates are preferred as they are willing to work for less, and have no qualms about bending over backwards to please the senior management. The experienced teachers are a dying breed and most schools prefer to hire young, attractive females, who look good, are cheap and are willing to put up with everything. The older lot, obviously, is not that easy to boss over; so they find opportunities drying up for them. In fact, fresh graduates are rejected on the basis of lack of experience, while their experienced counterparts are told that their previous experience is of no use and they will have to be retrained, in order to manipulate them into accepting a meagre salary. In a nutshell, you can’t win either way!
What does this bode for the future? In short, jo dikhta hai, wo bikta hai! Schools operate like corporate entities and the spirit of education is dying a slow but sure death. We need to keep stoking the embers of this fire, if we want to keep the flame burning. Do we have the motivation and desire to swim against the tide and more importantly, do we have the stamina? Most of us, at the end of the day, are just trying to make a living to make two ends meet. Only a very few can think of swimming upstream; the majority will be swept along with it. However, keep on doing your bit, for katra katra samundar banta hai!