Teacher’s Day

As we celebrate Teacher’s Day, a day to acknowledge and recognise the great contribution that teachers have made in our lives, it’s time to pay a tribute to their devotion and duty to a profession considered the noblest in character and most exalted in its station. It is one profession that arguably does and can create every other profession.
For most of us, the dreams of our lives have begun, most of the time, with a teacher who believed in you, who pushed, pressurised, and cajoled and led you to successive higher planes of understanding and wisdom. One who was harsh many times but never amiss in his pursuit of shaping you. And if we could develop deep convictions and abiding virtues, they are in a great measure on account of the inspiration that we received from them.  William A. Ward has so aptly said ‘The mediocre teacher tells. The good teacher explains. The superior teacher demonstrates. The great teacher inspires.’
Effective and lasting teaching is of course, a function of skills and sensitivity but it is also quite often a product of teacher’s character. ‘What the teacher is, is more important than what he teaches’, this observation of Karl Meninger underlines the salience of personal conduct of teachers that his or her pupils never fail to notice, and which greatly influences their own value system.
The returns that come to a good teacher are immense and beyond any measurement. They cannot be measured in material terms. 
And yet for many turning education into commerce has begun to find greater favour. This waxing trend of placing money over matter, and commerce over commitment is both unwelcome and unfortunate. A serious debate needs to be initiated over such eroding values that diminish the very purpose of teaching. Adaptability is necessary but the basic purpose of teaching cannot be making money.
A great nation builder though an autocrat, Mustafa Kemal Atatürk famously said, ’Better than a thousand days of diligent study is one day with a great teacher.’ And Socrates advice to all teachers was what he himself followed, “I cannot teach anybody anything; I can only make them think.”
A good teacher is like a candle—it consumes itself to light the way for others. There could be no greater and more sincere compliment to teachers.To remember them with reverence and gratitude is merely a modest attempt to pay an unredeemable debt.

(Uday Kumar Varma is an IAS officer. Retired as Secretary, Ministry of Information & Broadcasting)