Respect for student, teacher? Are you kidding?

Since 2018, the UN has celebrated January 24 as the International Day of Education. It’s one of the ways for the UN to reinforce some of education’s key values: learning as a means to enable lasting peace, learning as a human right, learning to enable sustainable development, and so on. It seeks to place the student at the centre of the educational exploration, which should happen in an atmosphere of student dignity and equality. It presupposes, in some ways, that learners and teachers co-create these ethics and values through the collaborative character of learning. Respect for the student and educator runs through it. 

Protecting and nurturing education at all tiers, be it primary, secondary or higher education, is not unlike tending to a garden or conserving a forest. The damage can be sudden, and can come from any corner and devastate like a forest fire. Education always requires heightened, lateral, short- and far-sighted observing to check its health, progress. It’s one of independent India’s greatest failings that governments aren’t voted in or out over how they fare on education. It’s no wonder that historically education has received measly to middling budgetary allocations. It’s hurtfully paradoxical that such an attitude prevails in a country that generates a redoubtable STEM NRI presence in Silicon Valley and beyond.

Earlier this month, students at IIT-Madras protested over some hair-raising policies of the institution that would run utterly in the face of the objectives of the International Day of Education. They are now on the backburner, thanks to the student pressure. If they had come into effect, students were to take new courses that required them to pursue one publishable research paper each term. They were to pay hostel fees (to make up for fees that were due) in advance for the full term at the beginning of the term itself. Now, this would have unduly pressured many students from straitened financial circumstances to cough up such amounts upfront. The work for the research paper may have meant almost full-time work (60 hours per week) but without the requisite pay. These were aimed at postgraduate and doctoral students.

With both these broadsides, IIT-M delivered a shocker. How inhumane and insensitive and how impractical! For all those student research papers to be completed so soon, you’d have to have faculty who’d help guide and turn those around. This is how effortlessly and thoughtlessly public education institutions, including the most well-reckoned ones, sully their reputation. They have no respect for either learners or teachers.

This is just one instance of the not-so irregular insanity that obtains in public (and private) educational institutions that goes against the letter and spirit of the International Day of Education. At the very core, is imagining the student as a respectable mind and spirit and sometimes as a worker. But Indian higher education has to speak to so many overseeing bodies from whom it may draw up its policies and imbibe values that it loses track of the fundamentals of learning, teaching, and creating a welcoming educational ambience. Almost everything we see every other day on our timelines as far as education is concerned conveys a mindset disrespectful of the student, and disregarding the teacher.

If there was respect and dignity, every other citizen would want to become involved in education in some form in India. It happens in the more materially advanced countries in the West. One hopes things transform for the better when the next International Day of Education comes around. To inculcate respect for the student and for the teacher, the UGC, AICTE, etc., must step in.