The New Education Policy has set ambitious goals. It is short, however, on how these goals will be achieved. Several of the goals, particularly for early education, are laudable and necessary. A focus on learning by doing, a multi-disciplinary perspective and increased emphasis on creativity and inquiry, would indeed be game-changers if successful.
Where will we find teachers who will be able to deliver these? How will we replace or transform inadequately prepared and poorly incentivised, and often absent, teachers that currently exist? A suggestion is to make the qualifications required for a teacher’s job to be more demanding. After all, don’t we want our teachers to be better qualified?
The answer, counter-intuitively, is a resounding no for the twenty-first century. It is a mistake to think of the teacher as an expert. It is better to think of the teacher as a motivator, an inspirer, a counsellor, a guru. In the gurukul tradition, the guru played exactly that role. The guru was not an expert. How could the guru possibly have been an expert in several fields?
An expert, by definition, means someone who has deep knowledge in one field. But the guru, or our twenty-first-century teacher, need only know where to find the expertise. The knowledge is now efficiently stored and can be retrieved easily using modern technology. For example, the best computer science course is more likely available as an online class by a top professor at Stanford or MIT that can be made available to hundreds and thousands of students anywhere in the world. But we will still need a wise teacher to tell us where to find the right information.
Thus, the teacher becomes a curator. This is not a trivial job. But the skills required are markedly different and I believe that many more people can be taught to become effective curators of knowledge than become experts and content creators themselves. This is good news because we need a lot more people who can become teachers with less onerous training and qualifications. Technology optimists may go further and even suggest that curators can be completely replaced by technology and intelligent search engines (an AI-enhanced Google search, for example). I disagree.
That is because I think a teacher, a guru, is more than a curator. Much more. A guru is someone with whom the disciple establishes a deep relationship not much unlike the relationship that a therapist develops with a client and a disciple did with the guru in the gurukul tradition. In psychology, there is a crucial point at which a transference takes place after which the bond between the therapist and the client becomes deep and trusting.
With more than three decades of experience as a teacher, I can tell you that many of my students’ preferred learning from me rather than from a really good textbook which is arguably more complete than the lessons I imparted. It is because, my students develop a trust-based relationship on which I could subtly guide them by emphasising what is important and what is not, what is meaningful and what is trivial, by using examples, analogies, humour, the Socratic method and other pedagogical devices.
My claim is that is what a guru did in our Indian gurukul tradition. So, to prepare a large pool of effective teachers in the twenty-first century, we do not need an army of teachers with advanced degrees like PhD’s or Master’s, but instead, we need more humanists who know where to find the right resource, the right expertise and the right information, but more importantly those who can be guides and counsellors.
In other words, an effective solution for education will be a hybrid solution. The best content will be developed by experts and made available in forms such as online videos, recorded conversations, interactive exercises. But we will still need people to handhold the students, to make sure they are motivated, follow up and do the exercises. Furthermore, the disciples will need inspiration without which little learning can take place.
(The writer is a Professor of Finance at the Indian School of Business (ISB) and taught at the University of California, Los Angeles for nearly thirty years)