Educating educators

SNS, 1 March 2014: In  the  absence  of  a  policy   at  the  national   level,    the    role    of    the  National Council of Teacher Education has   been   reduced   to   that   of   an  affiliating and inspecting entity without a   built-in    mechanism    to    enforce  standards throughout the country ~ RUDRASHIS  DATTA

There has been a significant evolution of the history of teachers’ education ever since Edward Carleton Tufnell, a civil servant, established the Battersea College in England in 1840 in order to equip tutors with the methods of handling children living on the streets of London. It is recognised the world over that teaching children requires empathy, dedication, and methodological and psychological inputs.
The concept of teacher-education is only a few decades’ old in India though individual efforts to train teachers in accord with the needs of children can be traced to Maria Montessori’s efforts  when she was in Madras in 1939.  The setting up of the National Council of Teacher Education, through an Act of Parliament in 1993, marked the first step in the institutional control of teachers’ education. The objective of the NCTE was ‘to achieve planned and coordinated development of the teacher education system throughout the country, and the regulation and proper maintenance of norms and standards in the teacher education system’. In the absence of a policy  at the national level, the NCTE’s role has been reduced to that of an affiliating and inspecting entity without a built-in mechanism to enforce standards throughout the country. Effectively, the relationship between NCTE and teacher-education institutions has evolved from that of equal stakeholders to a cat-and-mouse game. Institutions are decked up before an ‘inspection’. Things are back to square one once the ‘inspection’ process is over. The result of this glaring deficiency has led to the mushroom expansion of privately-managed teacher-education institutions with little concern for quality and a total disregard of the norms once the NCTE’s recognition comes through. Its role has been crippled over the past decade with the proliferation of teacher-training institutions, effectively forcing it to adopt a ‘recognize and forget’ policy.
Until even a couple of decades back, a modicum of learning and a willingness to work in an ill-paid and highly idealized occupation formed the criteria for teaching. With the increase in emoluments, the focus has shifted to the vital issues of standards of instruction and efficiency. It is recognized the world over that while the exceptional teacher is born, teachers in general are made. The path to the ‘making’ of a teacher goes through critical parameters such as pedagogy, teaching of children, acute awareness of teaching methods and the mechanism of learning and instruction. Clearly, teacher-education programmes are meant to provide such vital inputs to a teacher both at the time of entry into the profession and throughout the professional career.
Such programmes have advanced and diversified with more educational opportunities, although actual practices vary from country to country. In the United States, for example, each state is allowed flexibility and freedom to devise a curriculum that takes care of local conditions. In the United Kingdom, there is a national level uniformity in courses and curriculum. The Indian condition is similar with the exception that it is fairly easy to join up a teacher-education programme and easier still to complete the course. With no provision for a compulsory update of resources and knowhow, our  school teachers, though trained at the entry level or soon after entry, stagnate throughout their career leaving their students without the advantages of updated pedagogy and advanced instructional models.
Another drawback of the Indian system is the marked emphasis on theory,  against practical components. This leaves teachers with little knowledge of the actual situation in the classroom. While they clear a theory-dominated training programme through learning by rote, they run short of practical teaching skills. This lacuna was noticed as early as 2003 by Malcolm Skilbeck and Helen Connell in their report to the Australian government titled’ Attracting, Developing and Retaining Effective Teachers’. The report noted that ‘professional standards in teaching should not only typically refer to the content or subject-matter knowledge of teachers, but their communicative capability, their ability to organize, monitor, assess and evaluate learning and their practical competence as managers of learning in the school and the classroom.’
India realized this as late as 2010 when the ‘National Curriculum Framework of Teacher Education’ declared that ‘teacher-education must engage with theory along with field experiences to help trainees to view knowledge not as external to the learner but as something that is actively constructed during learning. Teacher education should integrate academic knowledge and professional learning into a meaningful whole.’ On a modest estimate, the country will require at least a decade to translate this  critical observation to reality.
The school education scenario has changed considerably since the passing of the Right of Children to Free and Compulsory Education Act, 2009. Since the Act requires school enrolment of all children up to the age of 14, it is only a matter of time before three crore children who have been out of the school education system, shall knock on the doors of nearby schools for admission. Teachers will be left with little professional expertise to manage and educate such a large number of children in addition to the present strength. With teacher-education institutions lacking both in numbers and quality of instruction, it is a foregone conclusion that the standard of education for our children might be  below par.  The after-shocks of such a severely compromised school education shall be felt universally in our socio-cultural, economic and technological spheres for decades to come. It is another matter altogether that some states are circumventing the need for serious full-time teacher-education programmes with hastily planned, sketchily executed and cursory training courses under the open and distance mode with a view to attaining the required ‘number’ of ‘trained’ in-service teachers  to satisfy the requirements of the Right to Education Act. With the target of such ‘programmes’ being numbers, the quality of instruction and methodology adopted fall far short of acceptable standards in teacher-education.
It is apparent that India’s teacher-education scenario is an unenviable mix of poor quality and equally poor numbers. Since one comes at the cost of the other, the fact that both quality and numbers are stacked against us points to the difficulties that lie ahead. One plausible model might be to shift the stress from pre-service to in-service teacher-education in a staggered manner that would last the entire stretch of a teacher’s career rather than aiming to ‘train’ all teachers in a hurried manner. The Indian Education Commission, chaired by D S Kothari, famously declared in 1964 that ‘the destiny of India is now being shaped in her classrooms’. It remains to be seen how our policy planners address the crucial challenges faced by teacher-education. These challenges are threatening to  denude the national intellectual wealth.