Three days ago I reconnected with a schoolmate: in her profile picture on Facebook she looked not a year older than she did twenty-five years ago, when I last saw her. We exchanged numbers and I called her. She told me she now lived in a small town in Uttar Pradesh, along with her husband and three-year-old daughter, and that she taught science in a Government school in a remote village.
“That’s the kind of job I would like to do,” I told her, as I imagined a small school, in the shade of a large neem tree, standing amidst lush green paddies.
“Everything sounds cool from a distance,” she laughed. “If you take up a job like mine you would run away in two days.”
A few hours later, she forwarded me an image on WhatsApp. It was a cartoon, showing a teacher — a bespectacled man with two pens in pocket — weighed down by various bags on his shoulders and an LPG cylinder on his head. One bag read ‘election duty’, another bag read ‘census’, and yet another bag read ‘survey’. The cylinder had ‘MDM’ written on it: the abbreviation stood for mid-day meals, as I found out later.
The cartoon was captioned: ‘Primary teacher master of every field.’ What it meant was that a teacher in a primary school is the master of every field. Then it struck me how true it was. They may be teachers but they were primarily the foot soldiers of the Government, doing things they are neither meant nor trained to do.
I called my schoolmate again and asked her to tell me a little more about her life as a teacher in a Government school. Following is the gist of what she told me.
She wakes up at the crack of dawn, leaves her child in the care of her parents who happen to live nearby, takes the transport corporation bus to a remote corner of the town and walks about 2 km (because there is no transport available) to reach the school.
On days she is assigned MDM duty (teachers take turns), the science class automatically stands cancelled because she takes charge of the kitchen. She goes out to buy vegetables and pulses, among other things, and supervises the cooking.
Besides, there is always some election or the other happening — panchayat, corporation, Vidhan Sabha, Lok Sabha — and so she spends about a week training for, and subsequently carrying out, election duties each time polling is held. And during polling, teachers cannot be posted in the school where they are employed, but in a faraway school. They must report at that faraway school the evening before polling and spend the night there — in that school.
Then the various surveys: sometimes caste survey, sometimes financial survey. Once in 10 years comes the mother of all surveys, the census, which keeps them busy for several weeks. For all these assignments they are paid a pittance.
There are challenges related to work as well: to keep the school functioning; to get children to join the school; to motivate them to come regularly for classes, because the parents would rather have them on the fields to lend a hand. And yet when a poor student from a Government school does well, the spotlight shines on the child and his parents — never on the teachers.
“I had no idea I would be expected to do jobs like these when I decided to become a teacher,” my schoolmate said, “most of the time we are so angry and frustrated that we hardly feel like teaching.”
The anger and frustration has become an attitude, and today it reflects on the country, which would have fared far better had the Government invested in motivating teachers, making them take pride in their profession, rather than treating them as its foot soldiers. Treat your teachers poorly, and you remain a poor nation.
