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Post by Thoithoi O'Cottage on Apr 28, 2015 4:47:16 GMT 5.5
While what they learnt at college and university long ago may be enough to provide what the curriculum and syllabus require school students to need, teachers who have stopped learning and updating their knowledge have a freezing effect on students, as if knowledge were something static and unchanging, piled up there for everybody to come and collect in time when they are of age, so everybody knows everything they need to know once for all time. Our knowledge about things keeps changing--new discoveries enrich our understanding correcting false knowledge and widen our expanse of knowledge; new modes of knowing things change our understanding of the same things even if our old knowledge about these things may still (basically) hold good. To take the old famous example, Galileo corrected the Ptolemic false knowkedge of a geocentric solar system, changing our understanding of the solar system and our place in the universe. The idea of a flat earth led European man into naturally thinking that the eastern shore of the Atlantic was the end of the world, and people held tightly onto that belief until several people, after being confronted with several signs to the contrary, proved it is actually round. This also was a major landmark in the history of man's understanding of himself and his cosmic environment and their interaction. Humans have been updating their knowledge and understanding, which would not have been the case if knowledge were a static, cut-dried-and-packed thing.
Changes happen in every area of our knowledge and understanding. Sometimes it is dramatic as in the examples above while it is upticks most of the time, which together have great, cumulative and incremental, hence dramatic, impacts over time. It thus follows that efforts should be made to keep teachers' knowledge ever updated to avoid stalling children's learning the latest knowledge, giving the impression that knowledge is static and definite, and making the spirit of learning stagnant by dint of the stagnance they themselves represent.
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Post by Thoithoi O'Cottage on Apr 28, 2015 5:12:03 GMT 5.5
The impression of knowledge being static and definite is so much associated with teacher stagnance that the former is brought about by the latter. This effect is concrete with mathematical exactness though it works very subtly, at the level of subconscious priming. School children don't need to know all their teachers know about their respective subjects; however, when the teachers' learning, and hence knowledge, has stagnated, the energy with which they teach automatically and accordingly weakens. The energy in people are kept alive and in flow not only by what they know but also by incessant updating of their knowledge. When the updating ceases, the flow freezes and the young minds learn in an stagnant field sheltered by the old shores of knowledge.
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Post by Thoithoi O'Cottage on Apr 28, 2015 5:37:09 GMT 5.5
Teacher knowledge stagnation is brought about by a complex mixture of several factors, including the lack of motivation among teachers to follow up on developments as a matter of passion, not updating the curricula and syllabi for years, less than enough and inefficient refreshers and training programs for teachers, no or inefficient teacher efficiency and evaluation system in place.
Manipur's scene exhibit all these symptoms. In my further posts, I will talk about these factors in detail.
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Post by Thoithoi O'Cottage on May 12, 2015 13:06:05 GMT 5.5
Why Insufficient Teacher Motivation?
How well education fares at a place does not depend solely on education planning and performance because (i) planning needs to respond to both demands and prospects and it should act on the vision of a future, and (ii) when performance translates the plan into reality, it runs on incentives of various forms.
Demand and prospect
Education being the powerhouse of our civilization, demand on education comes more from other areas than education itself, such as health care, construction, factories, security services, agriculture, management firms, finance sectors, R&D, the law, and other private and public institutions, and so on. Prospects give people purpose and direction and encourage them to invest their energy into its materialization. Without enough demand education, most of the time, cannot remain an end to itself like a fine art, and in time it is reduced to a ghostly existence. Such a society does not or cannot afford to have an exciting prospect. It is always difficult for education to get to its feet from such a position, because the society that is starved of the energy that education gives it is too weak to pull education up out of the pit. This shows the very intricate relationship between education and the tissues of society that education feeds and the very slow speed with which the interaction between the two has brought about what we call civilization, making it out of the rags of every early form of society. To put simply, education fuels society and society in turn puts demands on education making education evolve to meet the demands. The society which has this interaction, or rather this mutually causative relation, broken down is stinted like a bonsai which is dry but alive.
Manipur’s demand on education is very limited both in scope and in degree. We do not demand a space scientist or a team of them in Manipur. The scope of our civilization has not yet expanded to the extent of our requiring to install an ensemble of space science infrasrtucture with manpower owned by and managed by ourselves and working directly out of our land not in the way we are benefiting from the NASA, Microsoft, and Google. On the degree side, our scope has not yet demanded a CERN laboratory. While we need cars, the degree of our requirement will have to travel miles before our streets crave for McLarens, Hennessey Venoms, Zenvo, Mansory Vivre, Lamborghini Veneno, and so on. While we need good politicians, our political setup does not yet need global players like Obama, Clinton, Putin, Cameron, and so on. Call an Obama here, install him in one of our institutions, and he would end up in a khudei. These examples are cutting edge ones—the top of the time. Manipur’s demand struggles at the bottom.
Working in an almost demand-free condition, most of Manipur’s teachers—primarily at the high and secondary school levels—look suffering chronically from ennui. They do not find their job challenging—they use what they themselves learnt at their schools, colleges and universities long time ago all through their teaching career from joining till retirement, and our non-demanding society’s demand does not prove them inadequate. The result is these stagnant teachers remain in place and young children think what the globally-outdated teachers give them is all what is there to learn in life in the whole wide world, thereby sinking the society deeper in the stagnant pool of knowledge. If society demands more, teachers feel compelled to remain relevant by managing to keep themselves resourceful. Keeping the teachers resourceful is effected only by updating their knowledge, by following up on the developments in their respective fields. This is the responsibility partly of the state and partly of the teachers themselves. The state should make it mandatory for teachers (of both public and private schools) to update themselves on the developments in their respective fields by subjecting them to periodical assessment.
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