Permanent teaching jobs

Some thoughts on reading a newspaper article a couple of weeks ago - 

At the onset I clarify that I have, over the years, read Krishna Kumar’s articles,  learnt from them, and also shared them with friends. 


This particular article talks about problems in the school system today - a system that relies excessively on data and where ‘teaching and children don’t matter’. There is no denying these problems - many of which are driven by societal changes. The focus on ‘permanent teaching job’ - the first line onwards - though, left me perplexed! 


Now, the questions -


Let us begin with numbers - 

  • How many people have quit ‘permanent teaching jobs’ to return to ‘state of unemployment and uncertainty’? Is the number high enough that we need to be concerned in the manner that the article suggests? 
  • Where does this number of quitting teachers stand vis-a-vis the number of people lining up for teaching positions in government schools? 
  • How does it compare with the number of teachers who have moved from schools to coaching classes (especially those teaching sciences in higher classes) during the recent years?

On to jobs, permanent jobs - 

  • Is moving on from a permanent job and exploring the world - moving on from what one feels stuck in to figuring out what one wants to do in life - a bad idea? Is education (also) not about exploring, opening up, evolving, and accepting change? 
  • Why is a teacher leaving a school necessarily a sad event? Can something good not come out of this churning? For the students, or the teacher, or the school, or the place where the teacher moves to or for all of them? 
  • Have the permanent teachers not been one of the reasons for our schools’ (government, alternative or else) stagnation? 

And finally to assumptions - 

  • Is there an assumption somewhere that most of us who are teachers are teaching because we wanted to be teachers and not due to lack of options, better options? And, that we are good at teaching? 
  • Are these challenges - ‘violence’, ‘smartphone’, ‘bureaucratic aggression’ - limited to teachers?
  • Are our friends in other sectors not facing the complexities brought out by AI, social-media, multi-tasking, stress and all that comes with them? 

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