An Insane Teacher’s Dilemma

In a commercialized era of education, while teaching standards and commitment have progressively declined, but a rare breed of teachers serve as a last bastion of light, those who teach not for making a living but are rather driven by an insatiable hunger to teach and to infest the “civilized” with some virtues of freedom and sensitivity. The first breed of teachers constitutes of those who view it as a profession (noble or otherwise) and thus have their focus on remaining bounded within the ambit of curriculum with or without the intention of minting huge money in the process. It is the second breed of teachers, I want to dedicate this post to. This breed of teachers is impulsive, quintessential and non-pedantic by design and thus is not restricted within self-imposed boundaries and aim nothing less than a fundamental transformation along with passionate unhindered love for the subject. For this insane breed, there is a constant dilemma of how hard the students need to be pushed in the pursuit of that fundamental transformation. A precise and artistic depiction of this dilemma is presented in the movie “Whiplash”. The movie ends on a high note but not without raising its set of profound questions. Without providing answers, I want to raise certain pertinent questions.

1)    Merits and demerits of pushing students through punitive measures.

2)    The question of free will of students to be pushed little harder as at times it may be hard to distinguish between teacher’s will and student’s will.

3)    That precise mix of pressure and motivation that works wonders.

Unfortunately but at the same time fortunately, the pedantic literature does not offer precise answers for these. The contours of the precise mix become even hazier for art based teaching particularly those dealing with music, theatre and painting. This is primarily because there is a certain madness that would produce the next great artist and thus probably it makes sense to push the pupils harder so as to perpetually pose the fundamental question.

“How badly you want it. This is critical since success is 99% perspiration and 1% inspiration. This is especially true for artistic pursuits where the essential difference between being on the stage and getting lost is essentially the amount of blood and sweat put in that isolated room which the audience is blissfully unaware off”.

Often the unrestrained love and passion of certain restrained soul, for their subject is described as perfectionism and unprofessional. My only response would be the famous saying “Everything is fair in love and war”. As a self-imposed protagonist of these insane people, I would like to say just one thing.

“Believe it or not, the world thrives and celebrates only and only insanity. Strange.. perhaps cocky.. not at all.. All the great artists Mozart, Picasso along with the modern day reformers such as Steve Jobs, Bill Gates all possessed this insane passion about their respective fields. The only reason why we cannot replicate these great men of stature is their insanity and relentless passion..”.

The modern Indian education system is systematically and efficiently designed to curtail this passion that instills from the curious world of a child. The education system aims to embrace uniformity in production whereby the final output should aim for materialistic success and in the process end up being a poster-boy for consumerism. In such grave and despotic times, there are these lunatic teachers who aim to retain that innate passion. Let us celebrate them and their abstruse choices that aim at a turbulent merger between I, me and self at a spiritual level. Just some last words..

“While we may embrace majority as the rule of thumb to resolve disputes revolving politics to the most hackneyed subjects, but it is minority that actually matters to the world and takes humanity a step forward. We are incompetent as a species to worship majority because driven by that law of demand, we are somewhere fixated with a quintessential idea that everything desirable is invariably in short supply. It’s time we conserve and cultivate this insane breed of teachers and allow them to instill life into our souls. ”