teachers day quotes

No Laptops, Zoom or Internet: Meet the Teachers Who Continued to Teach Despite All Odds

The Pehchan Coaching Centre in Delhi’s Jaitpur extension caters to girls who have dropped out from formal schooling. During the lockdown, the teachers had to find innovative solutions.

New Delhi: Farida Khan, 53, runs the Pehchan Coaching Centre in Jaitpur extension – a recently populated locality near Madanpur Khadar village in Delhi with minimal infrastructural facilities and home to many people from lower-income groups. The area is dominated by migrant workers and daily wage earners.

Khan’s centre caters to a specific group of women students – those who come from financially poor backgrounds and have dropped out of formal schooling due to familial pressure as well as financial issues. In some cases, if a family has a son and a daughter, they send the son to study because they feel that it is not important for the daughter to be educated.

Currently, there are close to 30 girls enrolled in the centre.

Farida Khan. Photo: The Wire

Lockdown woes

The centre has always struggled with poor finances for many years. When in March, Prime Minister Narendra Modi announced a nationwide lockdown in the wake of the coronavirus pandemic, teaching became more difficult. Without resources such as laptops or Wi-Fi to teach students online, the teachers at the centre had to resort to teaching individual students over the phone, which meant that their work hours increased substantially. They continued to persevere and did not stop teaching students even when their salaries stopped coming due to the financial crisis that the centre faced.

“Life had suddenly stopped. The girls’ education had also temporarily stopped when the lockdown was announced. But our girls come from families who will marry them off if they don’t study and pass their exams. So it becomes important for us to teach them, no matter what,” Khan said, recalling the initial days of the lockdown.

Khan’s work as a teacher, however, is not just to teach these students. She and her group of teachers are also tasked with the job to visit the homes of young girls in this area, convince unwilling parents to allow their daughters to study, and once that is done – to make them appear for the Class X and Class XII board examinations in Jamia Milia Islamia through the distance education mode.

“Because we have to convince the parents of these girls to send them to our centre, we cannot afford to have boy students. Parents will decline to send the girls citing security issues. Even when the parents agree to send their girls here, they walk them to the coaching centre and some even wait outside until their classes are over, so that they remain safe. There is a lot of stigma attached to women who get harassed on the roads here, which is quite common,” she says.

The centre only admits students who are older than 15, the minimum age required to appear for the Class X or XII board exams at Jamia.

Students at Pehchan Coaching Centre. Photo: The Wire

Of WhatsApp groups and long phone calls

Farhat Khan, 38, is Farida’s daughter and also a teacher at the centre. She has been teaching at the centre for more than ten years, since Pehchan was established in 2009. Farhat teaches Hindi, home science, political science and sociology. She and the other three teachers at the centre cover more than one subject because there is a lack of teaching staff. The centre’s financial condition means that they cannot hire more teachers, and even the ones they have often receive a limited salary or sometimes even none.

She says, “I have gotten so attached to my girls [students]. It is important to teach them. When the lockdown started, my girls were giving their Class X and XII board exams, which were abruptly stopped midway. The lockdown continued for many months. We had to teach them anyhow, so we started teaching using mobile phones. I told my girls that they could call me at any hour, whenever they had any doubts.”

Farida says, “We had to discontinue our Wi-Fi connection at the centre because we couldn’t afford to pay the fee. So the teachers had to use their personal data for teaching. Sometimes, when the girls didn’t have money for the Internet charges, we had to recharge their mobile phones. Most parents had lost their jobs and did not have income for months, so they were struggling to even manage basic ration. They obviously weren’t able to recharge their mobiles for their daughters’ education.”

Out of the 27 students who had appeared for the board exams through Pehchan this year, 3 passed with first division. The number was better last year – six, Farida points out.

Four students, however, failed in a few subjects and had to reappear. “That’s when I thought I should start taking online classes, because teaching over a mobile phone didn’t work for them. But I didn’t have a laptop or a computer. The girls also didn’t have laptops. So that became a big issue,” Farhat recalls.

Farhat. Photo: The Wire

That’s when an idea struck her – teaching on WhatsApp, through video as well as voice calling. However, this also was difficult as many of the girls didn’t own a smartphone. “We convinced the girls’ fathers or brothers to let them use their mobile phones for the classes. For those students whose family also did not own a smartphone, I continued teaching them over long phone calls,” Farhat says.

Farida was worried when the students failed a few subjects. “I thought their parents would marry them off if they fail again. So I had to plan their studies in such a way that they surely pass the exam next time,” she says.

The teacher who returned

Vikram Kumar Jha, 32, joined the centre in 2015 but left because he had been unable to sustain his family of five – ailing parents, a wife and a daughter – with the meagre salary that he received. He has been living in Jaitpur for the past 15 years and knows the condition of girl students in the area. He takes private tuitions at his house in order to sustain the family.

When the lockdown was imposed, he returned to the centre – this time for no salary at all. He says, “The students who study here come from families that don’t allow them to study or don’t have enough money for it. Despite that, the students’ spirit never ceases to amaze me. I returned to these girls during the lockdown because I knew the difficulty they must be facing – and once I did, I felt like I was contributing to making the world a better place.”

Jha teaches English literature and political science. He, despite working two jobs, doesn’t have a laptop. He recalls, “Without a laptop, you don’t have the advantage of teaching a group directly, explaining one thing once for all, giving live examples while teaching. Sometimes, one student’s question answers the question of many other students also. However, this was not possible. We had to individually call every student and spend hours with them. Obviously, it was much more than any school hours.”

He added, “The responsibility to shape society is on teachers. We are just fulfilling our responsibility, not doing anything grand.”

Vikram Kumar Jha. Photo: The Wire

The threat of early marriage

Giving a background of the students that come to the centre, Farida says, “Very early on, girls that come to our centre faced pressure at home to get married. Since the girls started coming here, this has somewhat stopped. Parents are now okay with educating their girls before getting them married – and the girls also learn about their rights and place in society.”

According to Farida, government schools are at a distance of 7-8 kilometres from the locality. “Because of the kind of discrimination, harassment, and the physical threat that girls face in Delhi, parents are not comfortable sending their girls to these schools.”

Besides the regular challenges faced by Farhat during her teaching, one got her quite emotional.

She recalls, “I only have one smartphone at home, and my daughter also needed it for her online classes, as she is in Class IX. So, she used the mobile in the morning while I used it throughout the day to teach my girls.”

“What is Zoom?”

“Somebody told us about an application called Zoom on which classes could be conducted online. I had no idea what it was. How to download it, how to create a Zoom link, how to enter password…I had absolutely no idea. But still, I tried to learn it and introduced it to the girls [students]. But it didn’t work out, the girls also didn’t know how to use the application,” Farida says.

The centre took a total of three classes on Zoom, but ultimately decided that it was not a sustainable method for them because neither did they [students as well as the teachers] have laptops nor did they have a proper internet connection. The students as well as the teachers are not very well versed with technology.

“We are doing our best to make sure that these girls become successful in their lives,” Farida added.

When a CV Selectively Determines Academic Excellence

Chair, deanship and vice chancellorship positions constantly evade scrutiny on account of the seniority of their occupants.

In The Road to Academic Excellence: The Making of World-Class Research Universities, Philip Altbach and Jamil Salmi identify three parameters in the making of ‘world-class research universities’: the concentration of academic talent in faculty and students, significant budget levels, and strategic vision and leadership. Besides these, the volume’s contributors also examined sources of funding: state and private funding, grants, endowments, etc. – the IITs were also studied.

In what follows, I will leave out the second component – budgets, for that is a different subject – while thinking of, on this Teachers’ Day, of a landmark ‘summoning’ of the CV of one of contemporary India’s most distinguished teachers, and an icon to many: Professor Romila Thapar. An unparalleled honour to her, and an appropriate tribute by a Higher Academic Institution (HEI), surely? One hopes that Thapar will submit her CV, which may entail the use of a cargo train given the sheer quantum of her work, on Teachers’ Day.

The concentration of academic talent in an HEI is not, let us concede, purchased or acquired overnight by hiring Nobel Laureates. Concentration is accretionary and, studies have shown, such accretion of talented people is higher in institutions where such talent already exists. That is, highly talented people are drawn to work in laboratories and institutes where brilliant and successful people already work.

In his ‘Ten Simple Rules to Win a Nobel Prize’, Richard Roberts has two interesting points: work in a laboratory of a previous Nobel Prize winner’ or ‘Even Better … Try to Work in the Laboratory of a Future Nobel Prize Winner’. The point is: the level of intellectual conversation, challenge, even combativeness among the highly talented is so high that the quality of their individual output improves over a period of time (as opposed to university departments discussions devoted solely to API, Pay Commissions and abstract theories of social justice).

While Roberts may have been speaking tongue-in-cheek, it is true that the presence of senior and bright scholars can serve as the proverbial catalyst for the next generation of faculty and students entering the system.

Also read: The Savarkar Provocation and the Death of Studentship in India

At this point one should also, in all honesty, admit that such towering presences can also be a deterrent for newcomers – the ‘stress’, of executing projects, publications, is very high in specific departments of my own institution because of the presence of high-achieving senior faculty.

Therefore, to be able to converse, listen – even overhear – and be ‘taught’ by a mentor like Romila Thapar would surely be of immense benefit to the next generation of historians, cultural critics and political scientists of any HEI. This is precisely what ‘concentration’ of talent means: the attractiveness of an HEI to a future bright faculty precisely because the HEI already hosts a bright faculty.

The question of strategic vision and leadership is, to my mind, connected to the question of the ‘concentration’ of good faculty. What is the vision of the HEI’s top administrators when they set out to hire faculty? Is it determined by visions and considerations such as: are we hiring people who will continue the exceptional work trail-blazed by Romila Thapar?

Does their vision include a continuity – even with a difference, for all scholarship must diverge from its predecessor to grow – of the kind of scholarly pursuits exemplified by Romila Thapar, or do they have a different, monolithic vision for what constitutes as ‘research’ itself?

In the age of APIs, Indexes and monomaniacal quantification of data – faculty spend more time compiling certificates from conference attendance than writing papers for conferences (in fact, eco-friendly faculty recycle their academic papers) – it is more than likely that an Aristotle would not have become a professor at an Indian HEI on account of not having documented every lecture, every seminar attended.

If peer evaluation – and by peers from every nook and cranny of the world – is an index of the excellence of one’s scholarship, then the letters of support pouring in for Romila Thapar instance the highest, most intractable ‘index’ ever achieved by any Indian academic. True, her h-index may not be much, and her API may be quite low, but if scholarship is what stands the test of time, then surely there is something spectacular about a person’s influence across generations of scholars, students and peers.

Influence is not quantifiable, usually, but the number of scholars who begin their careers with a respectful nod towards a Thapar, a Said and a Fanon are instantiations of that scholar’s impact.

Also read: Cultivating Empathy in National Law Schools

Ironically, the Indian HEI’s elusive quest for eminence and excellence is accompanied by a subversion of the principles of E&E exemplified in the scholarship of Thapar and the others called in to prove their credentials. It is here that the vision of any HEI needs to be examined: to account for the pervasive impact of a scholar and to retain and widen it, must be the vision. Unless, of course, the regime is afraid of the impact of certain scholars.

Finally, let us concede that any HEI has the legal and moral right to scrutinise the CVs and research output of every single member on its payroll and list of employees. But perhaps we can begin at a much higher level. Given that the regulatory authorities, funding agencies, administrative officers are public officers whose salaries are paid for from public funds, let us begin with the ministers and bureaucrats in charge of education, members of the University Grants Commission.

Then we move to the vice chancellors: ask, what have they published, patented, produced by way of output in the last 5 years before they became vice chancellors? When we expect new assistant professors to publish in world-class journals, it surely is incumbent that those who adjudicate on their performance should be people with excellent credentials?

To digress, the best insight into my own career came from a colleague who said, “You will never become a professor because those sitting on selection committees have never even heard of the journals in which you publish!”

Faculty who serve on faculty screening and selection committees must first submit their CVs online for the record and public scrutiny. A national repository of every professor’s, head’s, dean’s and director’s publications must precede a repository of CVs of the assistant and associate professors.

As the National Education Policy’s draft document makes unusually explicit, we have relied too long on seniority, as though it automatically implies wisdom and a sterling CV – it most manifestly does not in most cases.

Also read: JNU: The Story of the Fall of a Great University

Which is precisely why, when we question the scholarship of the ‘talented tenth’, we are being hypocritical: chairs, deanships, vice chancellorships are occupied by ‘seniors’ whose CVs would constitute only a cipher in the footnote of a history of Indian HEI, if that.

In short, summoning the CV of scholars those whose reputation, impact, influence and commitment makes Indian academia what it is, is as close as we can come to academic heresy.

Happy Teachers’ Day!

Pramod K. Nayar teaches at the University of Hyderabad.

The Myth of Value-Neutral Teaching

Learning through doing, or learning through active participation in the world, as Gandhi indicated in his reflections on basic education, has tremendous significance. To forget it in the name of abstract scholarship is to miss the ethics of teaching.

Note: This article was originally published on September 5, 2018 and is being republished on September 5, 2019.

Medicine, law, business, engineering–
these are noble pursuits
and necessary to sustain life.
But poetry,
music, romance, love–
these are what we stay alive for.

∼ Dead Poets Society

Even though I love to celebrate Teacher’s Day, I am aware of the fact that not everything in our society is conducive to the cultivation of the spirit of teaching: teaching as an art, teaching as an authentic engagement with the self and the world and teaching as an inspiration for creating a better world.

This is also the time when creative/critical ideas that interrogate the status quo are silenced and suppressed, and teachers as docile role-performers are required not to be unnecessarily passionate, but only to perform their ‘professional’ duties – following the ‘official curriculum’, conducting the exam, retaining ‘order’ and equipping the students with the ‘skills’ that fetch them jobs – in a sanitised classroom: free from the turmoil and fire outside.

Hence, teach ‘fundamental rights’ as a set of constitutional principles, but don’t encourage your students to move around the world, and ask why the violation of these rights is so normal and frequent. Teach poetry as a ‘text’, but don’t tell your students to inquire why the cunning/prosaic world has always humiliated and laughed at its poets, or why, despite William Wordsworth’s reminder of the devastating consequences of the ‘meddling intellect’ that ‘mis-shapes the beauteous forms of things’, our techno-managers keep indulging with the violence of ‘instrumental rationality’.

Or, as I often crack a joke with my students, we seem to have mastered the technique of teaching Paulo Freire’s ‘dialogic’ education in a completely non-dialogic fashion, or reducing a novelist like Munshi Premchand into yet another soulless/standardised PhD thesis in Hindi literature. It is like referring to William Blake’s Songs of Innocence in a closed classroom amid the notorious presence of the CCTV camera. To think and act differently is to invite ‘punishment’ – from physical assault to ‘show cause’ notices.

As Teacher’s Day is celebrated, is it, therefore, possible to go beyond the usual rhetoric – teaching is a noble vocation, teachers are our revered gurus, and the constant flow of messages like “Thank you, teacher, for existing”? Is it possible to redefine the meaning of being a teacher?

For a scholarly teacher with creative passion

The young man who emerges from this system can in no way compete in physical endurance with an ordinary labourer. The slightest physical exertion gives him a headache; a mild exposure to the sun is to cause him giddiness….As for the faculties of the heart, they are simply allowed to run to seed or to grow anyhow in a wild undisciplined manner. The result is moral and spiritual anarchy.
∼ M.K. Gandhi

To begin with, we need to question the pretence of ‘value-neutrality’: the idea of a teacher without passion, without a position, without a worldview. This sort of ‘scientific teaching’ (I teach Physics, but I have no opinion on whether the state appropriates science, reduces it into a principle of domination, and the market prioritises research domains; I teach poetry, but everything in my life remains non-poetic; I teach democracy, but even for a second I do not ask my students to think of the undeclared dictatorship affecting every sphere of life) distorts the meaning of professionalism. In a way, it is an attempt to escape from one’s ethical responsibility, and hide in the discourse of ‘value-neutral’ scholarship.

No learning becomes authentic and meaningful without reflexivity and passionate engagement. Well, this does by no means mean that a teacher should not encourage his/her students to see the world from multiple perspectives, not merely the one he/she prefers. The art of listening – and listening to even one’s philosophic opponents – ought to be seen as a virtue of a teacher.

Yet, this humility does not mean that one is playing safe and refusing to commit to a position. In fact, without ‘experiments with truth’, or the constant engagement with the self and the world, you cannot bring the classroom closer to the world. This requires, to use the feminist vocabulary, the ethics of care. To know is to care. To know the world is to love it, heal its wound. To know the practice and institution of caste and patriarchy is to fight it and strive for an inclusive world. To study physics is to further relate to nature in a more meaningful way. Let a teacher not repeat what Francis Bacon said: Knowledge is power – power of domination. Let him/her convey a message to the new generation: Knowledge is love, and love is wisdom. Let a teacher not erect a wall that positivists talk about – a wall separating fact from value, science from poetry, objectivity from reflexivity. Let him/her talk about wonder and enchantment, debunking of falsehood and restoration of truth, criticality and positivity, theory as practice, practice as theory, knowing as doing, and doing as knowing.

No learning becomes authentic and meaningful without reflexivity and passionate engagement. Credit: DFID – UK Department for International Development/Flickr (CC BY-NC-ND 2.0)

Does it then mean that a teacher loses the rigour of scholarship, and becomes merely a preacher, a demagogue, an activist? This, I believe, is a wrong question because there is no contradiction between being a scholar and being a reflexive commentator of life, culture and politics. I wish to make my arguments with two illustrations.

First, think of a schoolteacher inviting children to the fascinating world of mathematics – say, the play of ‘fractions’ and ‘percentage’. Is it impossible for her to teach her students with all rigour and intensity, and then reflect on a societal riddle like this: ‘Kunal – a child from Goenka International School possesses 20 fancy woollen clothes, and Alisha – a girl from Shahdara Municipality school – wears only a torn pullover throughout the winter. By what percent does Kunal possess more than Alisha?’ A question of this kind helps the child to reflect on the world out there; and eventually – with the guidance of a good pedagogue – she can use mathematics for understanding the world’s asymmetry beneath the numbers – say, uneven consumption of milk and fruits across different social strata in a ruthlessly hierarchical society.

Second, think of a university professor asking her students to have a rigorous/scholarly reading of Michel Foucault’s Discipline and Punish. Does she negate the rigour of her intellectual skill if she asks her students to write a paper on the prevalent technologies of surveillance – from the all-pervading presence of CCTV cameras and constant ‘visibility’ over citizens through the 12-digit number called ‘Aadhaar’ and biometric devices? Or does scholarship mean writing merely a sanitised paper referring only to Bentham’s panopticon, quoting Foucault like a mantra and remaining absolutely silent about what is happening in front of our eyes? Learning through doing, or learning through active participation in the world, as Gandhi indicated in his reflections on basic education, has tremendous significance. To forget it in the name of abstract scholarship is to miss the ethics of teaching.

For a dialogic teacher with art of relatedness

All conversation derives its genuineness only from the consciousness of the element of inclusion, an acknowledgement of the actual being of the partner in the conversation.
∼ Martin Buber

It is equally important to realise that teachers are not merely ‘subject experts’; in fact, it is through history and physics, music and mathematics and anthropology and economics they are evolving a mode of communion with young minds. Teaching is a relationship, a touch, a promise to walk together – the way Tagore walked with children and made them see the unity of work and play, or Martin Buber pleaded for the ‘I-Thou’ relationship. Well, these days, because of the growing commodification of education, we see a new brand – teachers as traders of ‘skills’ located in all sorts of education shops, and engaged in a purely instrumental relationship with students as consumers of ‘packaged learning’.

Moreover, we witness the ‘online’ revolution filled with ‘virtual’ solutions that somehow diminishes the significance of a real/living/physically embodied engagement between the teacher and the taught. Under these circumstances, it is not easy to speak of the teachers who can make a difference in the way we see, perceive and experience the world.

Yet, we need them because we are living in dangerous times when, to use Zygmunt Bauman’s prophetic phrase, our ‘surfing orientation’ causes deathlessness; and when the overflow of media simulations in the ‘hyperreal’ world make it increasingly difficult to hold to some solid foundation of truth. Noise replaces dialogue; the spectacle becomes more real than the real; money transforms everything into its opposite; life becomes a ‘performance’; suicide bombers and ‘encounter deaths’ make everything absurd and meaningless and professional psychiatrists become the only ‘listeners’, despite the overflow of ‘Facebook shares’. Yes, we need teachers who can help us remove these dark clouds, and see the radiant sun. We need teachers who can make a distinction between propaganda and truth, living democracy and seductive authoritarianism, and the richness of the inner world and the packaging of the outer show.

We have Machiavellian politicians and clever technocrats. We have strategic diplomats and ‘pop stars’ of diverse kinds. We have academic bureaucrats, politically appointed vice-chancellors, exhausted/alienated schoolteachers caught into the repetitive cycle of election duty, census work and management of mid-day meal schemes, and fancy principals (or mediators between ambitious parents and corporate owners) of elite schools. But where are the teachers who touch our souls and inspire us to imagine, to borrow from John Lennon’s musical metaphor, “no hell below us/above us only sky “? On this special day let us strive for them.

Avijit Pathak is a professor of sociology at JNU.

As a Teacher, I Believe We Need to Think Carefully About How We Vote in 2019

Do we really want our children growing up without self-awareness, empathy and the ability to think critically and resolve conflicts peacefully? It is time we elected those who truly care about our collective future.

As the country celebrates Teachers’ Day on September 5, it is my sincere hope and prayer that the BJP does not come back to power in 2019. Let me explain why.

I have been teaching high school students for the last 25 years. The subjects I teach, however, are not commonly found in a school’s curriculum – empathy, listening, conflict resolution and relationship management. They are, nonetheless, the building blocks of a good life. Extensive research over the last three decades has given scientific undergirding to what we have always known intuitively – that emotional and social skills do indeed help children have not just a happier school experience, but do better academically as well.

At the turn of the millennium, the World Health Organization finally gave emotional and social intelligence their due and mandated the teaching of ten ‘Core Life Skills’ in schools around the world, namely self awareness, empathy, critical thinking, creative thinking, decision making, problem solving, stress management, conflict resolving, effective communication and coping skills.

But it wasn’t until 2008 when professor Martin Seligman (former president of the American Psychological Association and one of the founders of the positive psychology movement) helped Geelong Grammar School, one of Australia’s largest schools, build social and emotional learning into the structure of the school curriculum itself that ‘positive education’, as it came to be called, found a serious foothold in the rather stern, empirical world of education.

Encouraged by their success at Geelong, Seligman and his team then went on to help the government of Bhutan craft a ‘national happiness curriculum’. Subsequent evaluations of this curriculum and its effect on children showed that incorporating the teaching of social and emotional learning in schools did indeed have a tangible and lasting impact on the lives of school children, measurably improving their academic performance. They also helped to establish and embed systems and curricula of ‘positive education’, as it came to be called, in Brazil, Peru and the UK. Positive education, has, since, caught on slowly but surely, (though admittedly erratically) in many countries around the world. Closer home, the Aam Aadmi Party government in Delhi, its many political troubles notwithstanding, has also recently introduced a ‘happiness curriculum’ in state government schools.

One of the biggest and recurring lessons shared by the growing tribe of ESL (emotional and social learning) teachers to which I belong is that in the case of ‘subjects’ directly related to human behaviours such as empathy, conflict resolution and coping skills, children learn by observation and example much more than they do by instruction and curriculum. Simply put, values are caught much more than they are taught – not just by the immediate example of their teachers and families but also by the example of role models in society at large.

Which is why I fervently pray that the BJP does not return to power in 2019.

While it is true that other political dispensations have hardly been exemplars of character and civic virtue, the moral fibre of the country has never been weakened as seriously has it has since the current dispensation came to power. The last four-and-a-half years have seen a relentless and steady attack not only on educational institutions across India but on the very idea of modern, liberal, progressive education. This has been made abundantly clear by the government’s budget cuts in education, its policies and attacks on institutions of higher learning. But there is a deeper harm that is being inflicted on the minds and hearts of millions of children around India and that is the blatant undermining of the very qualities and strengths of character, the emotional and social skills that undergird a healthy, flourishing, democratic society.

Let’s take a look at the damage that has been inflicted on the psyche of our children through the lenses of five of the ten ‘Core Life Skills’ that the WHO has mandated:

Self-awareness

Self-awareness is probably the mother of all ‘Life Skills.’ It is only when we become truly aware of both our strengths and weaknesses that we can grow in objectivity and compassion not just for others but for ourselves as well. But if representatives of an elected government make a concerted effort to impose religion and/or caste as a primary identity, then genuine self-awareness goes out the window. If a child has been taught to see himself as a creative, self-aware human being, he will think about what he thinks and as a result, will strive for creative engagement with others. But if a child’s primary identity is one of religion, caste or community, then that child will start seeing himself merely as a representative of “his side”, he will think only what his group thinks and will thus find him locked in a state of perpetual superiority, condescension and conflict with those who are not on “his side.”

If representatives of an elected government make a concerted effort to impose religion and/or caste as a primary identity, then genuine self-awareness goes out the window. Credit: Reuters

Empathy

The relentless stereotyping and demonising of “the other” are designed to kill empathy. The very essence of empathy is mutuality and the fact that my humanity is caught up in yours. But if I am convinced otherwise, then I don’t see you as a fellow human being worthy of dignity and respect and it will be much easier for me to attack and brutalise you.

Critical thinking

Implicit in the ability to think critically is the freedom to question and disagree with what I have been taught. If I am threatened with dire consequences every time I question authority, then, unless I am an exceptionally courageous person, I will not question the prevailing narratives. What kind of an example are we setting for our children when activists who have spent a lifetime ‘thinking critically’, questioning the government and fighting for the rights of the most disadvantaged members of society are suddenly branded ‘enemies of the state’ and arrested?

Arun Ferreira being taken into police custody on Tuesday. Credit: PTI

Conflict resolution

Children need to be actively taught how to resolve conflicts. They need to be taught the art of communication. Instead, what they get to see are prime-time news programmes on TV every night where conflict and abuse are encouraged and promoted. Add to this the vitriolic rhetoric of our leaders and their hateful comments regularly aired on television. Our prime minister may speak good and beautiful things on his ‘Mann Ki Baat’ radio broadcast. He must not forget, however, that children have never been good at listening to their elders but they have never failed to imitate them.

Effective communication

In a world engaged in a perpetual non-stop conversation a la’ Facebook, Twitter and Instagram, the ability to communicate respectfully has become more critical than ever. But what is a child to do when the level of public discourse has fallen so low that a member of the ruling party calls the leader of a major opposition party “a gutter worm” (just to use the most recent example) and gets away with it?

Do we really want our children growing up without self-awareness, empathy and the ability to communicate respectfully, think critically and resolve conflicts peacefully? As a twig bends, so the tree grows. What the India of tomorrow will be, it is already becoming in the lives of millions of our children.

It has been said that the difference between a politician and a statesman (or stateswoman) is that the politician only thinks about the next election. The statesman (or stateswoman) thinks about the next generation.

It is time we elected those who truly care about our collective future.

Rohit Kumar is an educator with a background in Positive Psychology and Psychometrics. He works with high school students on emotional intelligence and adolescence issues and helps to make schools bullying-free zones.