Author: Rajdeep Mahanta, UG 2nd Sem, History, Cotton University, Guwahati, Assam, India
Teacher, a word that invokes a sense of respect and admiration for most and contempt for some; a person who is ideally second just to our intimate family in terms of love and care. A person who leaves a lasting impression on young minds. It’s they on whom lies the onus to shape the future generation of world citizens.
Well, while these are certainly noble words, is it appropriate to levy so high regard and responsibility on Teachers? After all, they are also humans and it’s also a profession. And many if not all are also engaged with the profession for their benefit. They all might have been driven by some personal ambition into the profession.
Still, in my view, the answer to this question must have been a thousand yes. They do deserve this sort of respect and responsibility, as is generally bestowed upon them. This responsibility derives from a large number of people (or I may say generation) dependent on a Teacher. And so, as the famous poet Dr Kumar Vishwas rightly puts it ‘if a Doctor is inefficient, he might endanger the life of his patients if an engineer is not efficient, he/she might endanger the life of commoners who engage with his constructions but if a teacher is not efficient, he/she endangers an entire generation of future nation builders”. Thus, as is evident from this beautiful depiction of a teacher’s role by Dr Vishwas, a Teacher affects not only the present but also the future of a nation. To add to Kumar’s description, I would like to say that a teacher’s deficiency or neglect hampers not only the physical but also the mental prospects of a child.
While at first sight, this might seem an exaggeration of a Teacher’s role. But, on proper examination, it will appear that nothing can be truer than this. We all must have come across different teachers in our lifetime. We must have observed that whenever a teacher explains an academic concept by relating it to real-life experiences and is open to our questions no matter how stupid the questions are, we feel connected to the subject. In that sense, a teacher can attract or distract us to or from a field. And this important role of teachers is well encapsulated in our epics and Vedas as well as is visible in the prominence given to Drona and Vishwamitra in these epics.
A teacher’s role is not just limited to the four walls of a classroom nor is good academic results for their students the only measure of their success. It goes much beyond that. In my opinion, A teacher’s foremost job is not to provide good notes to their students but to provide them with the wisdom and intelligence they can prepare good notes. And to ensure that there shall be interaction with the students. A good teacher should welcome and try to address all types of queries that come to their students’ minds, even if they do not fall within the prescribed curriculum. In other words, the teachers should bestow the wings of wisdom and knowledge to the young minds to fly in the sky of knowledge.
And in the end, to have a good teacher we also need to be good students as it’s a give-and-take relationship. “To have a Dronacharya, you need to be an Arjuna”. It’s this wonderful partnership of a dedicated and broad-minded teacher and sincere student, that is one of the core pillars behind the development of any nation.
