What is Worth Teaching?

In ancient India and Greece, teachers were revered as a guru or a master, and most importantly, they were fully empowered.  The teacher decided, based on his understanding of the student, what to be taught, when and how or what not to be taught, withheld, or even refused. But the situation was different in those days.  Education was only for a select few –mostly children from the noble family and the rich got education, and the aim of education was basically for moral development and the pursuit of pure knowledge.

Along the way, two major changes occurred. Firstly, education was opened to the general public, and secondly, the government took over the responsibilities of educating the public. These two factors are critical and become indispensable when considering the future of education.

When education is opened to all, we need to set aims and objectives so that we know what kind of future we create for our students, we need to plan and develop appropriate mechanism for teaching and imparting those knowledge we selected as worth teaching, and most importantly, we needed to decide how best to teach an entire population, and that too, at the least minimum budget level. But the major question is: who are the ‘we’?  

The entrance of the government in education system can be viewed from two aspect; the government is possibly the only institution capable of educating the whole masses in term of reach (every corner of the country), financial power, and Authority (respect demanded) to provide education. On the other hand, the government is made up of people who are not necessarily qualified, with their own ideological beliefs and objectives that influence their world views. Now what, if the government want the education system to reflects its ideological beliefs? And, what kind of society does the government want to constitute through its education system?

‘What is worth teaching?’ may sounds like a fairly simple question, but it hides many complexities.  Education is a crucial social good, a definite avenue for developing individuals and society, and thus the world.  And as such, it is crucial that decisions related to education must somehow be determined by larger social will, factoring in social, economic and cultural concerns.  

To factor in the social will, there is no better representative than the government.  But can we trust the government to decide what is being taught at our school? We can try trusting the government and take comfort in the assumption that the government chooses the most sensible and qualified of people who are charged with the job of selecting and deciding what is to be taught, and hope that they do what they are supposed to do, and that they did a good job!

We must also assume that these sensible people selected by the government has no vested interest, and most importantly, we definitely must assume that the government has no vested interest of its own in the kind of knowledge that is being taught in school. 

The Preamble in the constitution of India has clearly spelled-out what it plan to achieve, that aims, is also the aims that we plan to achieve through education.  It means, the deliberations or decisions regarding what are being taught at our school are not deliberate, but methodical and selective, and validly drawn from the accumulated body of knowledge that humanity has with us.

As teachers, teacher educators or anyone connected with education we rarely get to reflect or understand our work in schools and classrooms within the context of the bigger historical, socio-political setting of the country. It never seems to be part of the training and induction process for the Indian teachers, or educators.

What is worth teaching in school, what is worth learning for our children, and what sort of activities must be considered as worthy, etc. are a crucial issue for any educational system and institution.  These questions has been asked for ages now, and it will continue to be asked, which is a positive sign, because if we ever stop asking these questions, we will never know what kind of future we are creating through what we taught to our children, and thus, the future of our world.

[This is an extract from my review of Krishna Kumar's Book "What is Worth Teaching?"]