GYANOPROBHA

HOW TO DESTROY YOUR IMMUNE SYSTEM THROUGH OVER-MEDICATION

No, this is not a little disquisition on human physiology. 

In his farewell speech in 1961, US President Eisenhower warned against the insidious influence of what he called the "military-industrial complex" (on the advice of his staff, he abandoned his original intention of calling it the "military-industrial-congressional complex"). Not only have his warnings obviously fallen on deaf years in the nearly fifty years that have passed, but the military-industrial complex has now grown in size and scope to include the congress (as Eisenhower already feared), think tanks, universities, media, and now, as the Washington Post has revealed, also the intelligence. 

In the last ten years, according to this Washington Post report, the so-called "war on terror"has now spawned a self-reinforcing and self-justifying intelligence industry with no accountability, no reality checks, and no quality control - just like the so-called "defence" contractors and private military and intelligence firms that have fattened themselves, often on on no-bid contracts, from the boundless opportunities for killing and destruction. If ever you needed evidence to see how utterly futile, counterproductive and self-destructive the so-called War on Terror has turned out to be, this is it. 

Now that no one seems to know what the heck is going on, no one is responsible for the big picture, or connecting the myriad dots into some sort of pattern, what is to prevent one of the private contractors from starting its own false flag operation, or from purveying intelligence deliberately designed to promote a self-aggrandizing agenda? It's not as if there are no connections between some of these contractors and the most extreme political forces in the US, including some who see themselves as bringing forward the second coming of the Messiah. Think Dick Cheney with KBR, Erik Prince with Blackwater/XE...doubtless there are others I am not aware of. Besides, it's very likely that the loose networking and the information overload will allow in just those firms and individuals who are likely to have such an extreme agenda. 

So, after spending billions trying very hard to (over)protect themselves, the US government now probably feels more threatened than ever - according to the FICKLE logic described by Ray McGovern in his analysis of the intelligence snake-pit in which the US government finds itself. 

Why do I worry about this? Because India boasts of a special alliance with the US, which ties its fortunes to the fate of the US. Now another partner in the eternal war on terror wants to muscle in and create another "special relationship" with India. Almost the entire British cabinet is soon coming to India, and will be feted and dined by the country's business celebrities. But what are they coming for? According to The Telegraph: 

Cameron hopes to secure contracts worth £1 billion (Rs 7,200 crore) for the British defence industry. His team will seek to press British interests in India’s $11-billion (Rs 51,364 crore), 126-aircraft fighter procurement contest.

Six manufacturers are in the running for the lucrative deal, with EADS, the consortium that includes British aerospace company BAe Systems, offering the Eurofighter Typhoon jet. Britain also hopes to sell India 57 more hawk jet trainers, in a deal worth £500 million (Rs 3,600 crore), in addition to the 66 fighters BAe is already contracted to provide.

So much more urgent to keep the killing machine well-fed than fighting the genocidal levels of deprivation and poverty that "shining India" now manages to register! This is a small indication that India is likely to go down the same self-destructive path as its partners and allies like the US and the UK of devoting more and more resources desperately needed elsewhere in feeding the killing machine. Feeling safer already? 

There will still be people who will deride my thinking as simple-minded, soft-headed, or bleeding-hearted. The next terrorist attack from across the border, they will claim, will not induce hysterical demands for opening new schools or for feeding the hungry, but for bombing the country that sent the terrorists back to the stone age. In the present climate of self-induced paranoia, they will probably sound convincing. But they will fail to convince anyone by their arguments - if they have any - that their allegedly more "realistic" solution of continuing to throw billions into the bottomless pit of the war in terror now will make us any more secure in the future, let alone bring about a world we would all want our children and grand-children to live in. 

So...to return to the medical metaphor suggested in the title...have we already medicated ourselves beyond repair? Ultimately, there is no there is no better way to build long-term immunity against terrorism than to disinvest from the industries of destruction, and re-invest in rebuilding vibrant, creative and dignified societies in which everyone has a stake: through promoting learning and creativity, improving public health, protecting the environment, rebuilding the infrastructure, creating jobs for those who can work, and a support system that ensures that people who can't are still able to live in dignity and with respect as members of society. What's more, there is every indication that we are running out of time to adopt this solution. But governments will not do it by themselves: they are mostly the doctors who have been prescribing the wrong medicines because they stand to gain from our helplessness and dependency. It is for people to draw on their instincts for survival to either change their governments, or opt out of the systems that keep us scared, angry and hungering for peace and justice. 

THE DILEMMAS OF THE "PROFESSIONAL" TEACHER

Why are most schools so badly structured for achieving their publicly stated goals? Taking mostly bright, inquisitive, active young children away from the real world for which we are supposed to be preparing them, keeping them locked in rooms in the company of an adult who will drone at them for forty minutes before releasing them to another adult who will do the same...ten times during the day...days punctuated by bells... days that run into a dozen years interrupted only by vacations which are increasingly filled with breathlessly anxious prepping for "success''.

Does this sound like the real world to you?

Not unless the world that we are preparing them for is a prison or a factory governed by a panoptical regime which tracks every waking and sleeping moment of its inmates, and occasionally spews out reports about the condition of the prisoner or the output of the worker.

So it's not a surprise that professionalism in teaching is mostly about compensating for these structural contradictions! According to some books about teaching, we are supposed to be able to engage learners and keep them on task every lesson, document every learning moment, form judgments about their learning as well as ours...while accepting overcrowded or overheated (or underheated) classrooms, administrative procedures for generating mostly useless information, ever-changing government policies, new requirements for testing....all the while mindful of the individuality of each student, and keeping the classroom environment conducive to learning. But this is not how teachers actually teach, although it's perfectly true that good teaching and learning in most schools happen - if and when they do - despite, not because of, the systems and structures that are in place.

Good teachers do spend a great deal of time trying to design engaging and interesting activities with clear objectives before the student. I say "trying to", because the three crucial resources required for good teachers to thrive - time, material resources, and the affirming and supportive companionship of teachers with ideas and passions - are almost always scarce. Most teachers who take their profession seriously are being "professional" to the extent that they are striving to do their best by their students, while ignoring or trying to circumvent or compensate for the constraints and systemic failures that keep them from doing their best. The pressures created by the systemic failures often take their toll on teachers' personal lives in the form of isolation, frustration, cynicism, fatigue and burnout.

A good school is one where teaching with integrity and passion is not a daily struggle against interruptions, delays, failing technology, administrivia, isolation, lack of time and appropriate resources, and students are not usually violent, rude, intransigent, tired, or just having their own difficult times. Such schools are rare enough. But a great school is where the systems, structures and ethos consistently support teachers in giving their best, even if the students are not ideal and the furniture and technology is a bit run down. These are extremely rare.

I don't wish to suggest that all teachers are selfless saints struggling in exploitative schools run by evil heads. Some of us are bone lazy, and would prefer nothing better than to teach from notes and administer tests that have remained the same for the last ten years. There are days when I myself have walked into my classroom without the faintest idea of what I should do with my students (you have to believe me when I say I don't make a habit of this), and sometimes wished that I had these ten year old notes to fall back on. A school that I know with an unassailable reputation as a "successful" school, and one, moreover, to which all parents in this country aspire to send their children, has a good number of such teachers, secure in their comfortable sinecures for decades. Many teachers are self-satisfied, teach the way they have been taught, remain in blissful unawareness of the changes in educational practice, and rely mostly on teachers' folklore and war stories about what makes a successful student or an inspiring lesson. Many teachers make terrible students, and admit as much among themselves half-jokingly. This is because most teachers work within schools and in educational environments that demand a great deal of them by way of managing large class sizes, piles of marking, high pass rates in their exams, but very little by way of artistry in designing good lessons.

To counter such tendencies among teachers, administrators sometimes spend time drawing up long lists of what makes a Good Teacher, in the hope that once they put these lists into a faculty handbook, every teacher will strive to become a Good Teacher. The list then often becomes a device to catch teachers out in their failings, however minute, if it becomes necessary to retrench them. Such administrators rarely have time to visit the classrooms in their schools, and seldom talk to their teachers about teaching and learning, about the best way resources - especially time - could be used to support their work. They don't communicate by example or by empathy, but by fear. 

The best teacher (and the best administrator) is one who supports students (and teachers) through conversations, commitments and action. These conversations are judgmental only to the extent that it supports the student (and the teacher) in discovering ways of improving their learning performances. But the main attitude behind these conversations is patient optimism, the main commitment is to steady improvement till mastery (often defined by some publicly available standard of performance) is achieved, and the action is mainly of supporting in various ways the efforts of the learner to attain mastery.

Unfortunately, most teachers are under pressure from parents and administrators to raise the scores of their students (the only criterion of success) in standardized exams and tests. Administratively, tests and exams are the most convenient ways of assessing achievement, and exams requiring single responses are much more efficient at measuring achievement than exams requiring evidence of reflective and evaluative thinking. It all depends on what one means by 'achievement'. Pedagogically, exams and tests are among the worst instruments for assessing achievement if the achievement being assessed is in the depth and flexibility of understanding (comprising conceptual grasp, awareness of one's own thinking, and ability to apply in unscripted situations as evidenced in actual performances or artifacts of understanding). How after all would you assess a swimmer's ability to swim? By having him write a test on swimming or by watching him swim in various settings? Why is it any different if one wished to judge a learner's mathematical ability, or understanding of business, or of biological principles or of historical changes? It's different because it's administratively convenient for the highly complex and individualised process of learning to be flattened into a standardized format yielding numerical results as a product that could then be accepted by schools, parents, universities and of course children as representing scholastic achievement. The teacher's role then is to "improve" scholastic achievement as measured by these numerical indices. And when teachers are rewarded professionally by the degree to which they can get their students to show this success, then their commitment to steady and patient improvement in performative and artifactual evidences of understanding is undermined, and the effective teacher becomes the efficient trainer of techniques for achieving exam success. 

Teachers need to constantly bear the burden of living and working within this structural contradiction: the burden of struggling to keep alive the kindly light of developing learning and self-awareness both within their students and in themselves; but doing so amidst and despite the encircling gloom of industrial modes of schooling, with their fixed times for absorbing knowledge and skills, their standardized measurements of student achievement in exam scores and the associated traumas of failure, their inability to accommodate individual learning styles and trajectories within the standard curricular molds, and the boredom and self-destructive behaviour induced by their worship of efficiency. The master teacher is the one who has learnt to resolve this contradiction in his/her own context and environment.