How India can do justice to teachers

Teachers are aggrieved. The UGC, they say, has done them in. If so, it is a serious matter. Teachers are the role models of a society. They need to be respected and cared for.

The work they do, educating the future of India, is an incomparable national asset. Here is a list of suggestions for doing justice to teachers, students and the taxpayers, whose toil sustains the academia.

The programme of action suggested, is based on the following guiding principles -

(a) Each teacher should be allowed to choose the quantum of work he/she would like to do per semester or per academic year, as the case may be. This upholds the principle of freedom of choice.

(b) Each teacher should be paid well. This takes care of respecting and valuing the work done by teachers.

(c) Each teacher must be paid only for the work done. This takes care of the principles of integrity at work and of just reward.

(d) Stability of employment must be linked to a person's work culture, commitment to teaching and evidence of growing in the profession. This takes care of the principle of natural justice towards students and the taxpayer.

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Now, therefore, the following suggestions -

1. Let a survey be conducted among present teachers to elicit the number of classes (lectures/tutorials/practicals), they wish to take per week for the ensuing five-year period, with the proviso that no teacher will be allowed to opt for more than 30 classes per week. Once opted, the quantum should remain unchanged for the five-year block period.

2. Classes then taken be remunerated handsomely, say, at Rs 3,000-4,000 per class by an assistant professor and Rs 5,000-7,500 by associate professors. They could be paid even higher.

3. Teachers be paid on the first of every month, according to the number of classes actually taken. This must be certified by the head of the institution, who should be fully authorised to put in place adequate arrangements to ensure that the data thus certified are foolproof.

For example, arrangements to be made for registering biometric attendance at the commencement of each lecture with machines placed at the entrance of each classroom so that the classes taken are centrally registered and the data easily processed. The teacher concerned should have the option to get any discrepancy rectified.

4. Appropriate measures for assessing the competence and commitment of teachers be adopted. Here are some suggestions -

(i) Students' feedback

(ii) Each faculty member to be required to offer one public lecture per year in the subject/topic of his/her expertise, so that there is a flow back from educational institutions to the larger society. This practise is in vogue in several Western universities. This helps the teacher in gaining exposure to a different audience and to withdraw the iron curtain of classroom secrecy.

(iii) Each faculty member should be required to submit a half-yearly report of the reading and research done, highlighting its linkage to quality of teaching.

(iv) Each teacher should be required to publish at least one article per year in a standard (peer-reviewed) journal as well as conduct a faculty seminar based on the significance of the paper. This will take care of faculty improvement programmes and it should substitute the present orientation programmes, which are mostly useless. (An institution must become a place of growth and teachers should not have to be sent here and there for their enhancement) Surely, producing one paper per year cannot be back-breaking.

(v) A teacher should be required to be present and available to students (for consultation, counselling and guidance) for at least 15 hours per week, besides the hours of formal teaching. [This not to be paid for, but deemed organic to the teaching vocation] This is most important, as the overall well-being of students, and not merely walking them through the syllabus, is the responsibility of a teacher.

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Under the existing regulations, a teacher is required to be available in the institution for a total period of 40 hours per week. Not even one per cent of teachers comply with this. Strictly speaking, teachers are paid not only for the 14 or 16 hours of work they do in classrooms. They are paid for 40 hours of availability in the institution. Seen thus, most teachers, sad to say, are guilty of truancy.

One of the weakest links in the chain of higher education today is the disempowerment of principals/ heads of institutions. Progressively their functional authority has been compromised. The teachers gang up against them.

Destabilising the office of the principal helps to abolish accountability and undermine discipline. Most principals live in fear of teachers and enter, guided by the instinct of self-preservation, into quid pro quo arrangements with the more aggressive among them, which vitiate the learning milieu.

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Surely, teachers cannot say that they must be paid for the work they will not do. Or, that they must be licensed for truancy. The greatest assets of a teacher are her personal integrity, stature and academic scholarship. The proposals outlined above take care of all of these.

Those who value education are bound to feel embarrassed, when teachers resist transparency and accountability. It is incomprehensible that teacher organisations resist students evaluations and biometric attendance.

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Why the present hue and cry against enhanced workload does not carry credibility is that almost every teacher I know, given the opportunity, would opt for extra work of any kind outside their colleges.

The allurement of additional income contributes to this mysterious elasticity of time and energy. The psychology at work here is embarrassingly transparent. Most teachers take their monthly pay for granted.

The extra Rs 5,000 they make per month is valued a great deal more than the Rs 100,000 they are paid as salary. The very same attitude is prevalent among karmacharis; and the moral distinction between the two categories is now virtually non-existent.