In school after school, year after year, millennium after millennium, chief guests come and dutifully remind their young audience that “the future of this great country lies in your hands”. Children squirm uneasily in their seats or on the ground as the case may be, and pray that the homily should end mercifully quickly. Sermon delivered, the chief guest drives away in his cavalcade. The school breathes a sigh of relief, and gets on with the business of getting on. In the meantime, India continues to burn. A disturbing number of states are constantly on the brink of civil war, the communal scourge revisits time and again, corruption eats away like an acid, caste wars lead to mass execution. Who needs terrorists?

So where have we gone wrong? Or where indeed are we going wrong? Is it not time for us educators (both parents and teachers), to stop pointing fingers at all and sundry, and see for ourselves why we are failing to deliver? After all, the politicians who took bribes for votes in parliament did go to some school or the other.

Perhaps the biggest tragedy that has befallen the nation today is that schools have been reduced to mere curriculum delivery machines. There is no effort to spend quality time and effort in inculcating values amongst the children entrusted to our care. An index of the enormousness of this problem lies in the fact that some educational boards are attempting to introduce ‘value education’ as a subject in the curriculum. Is not the word, education, supposed to be inclusive of values in the first place?

Part of the reason for the lack of time and effort in this area is, of course, the seemingly impossible demand for ‘marks’ being made by the system. As the educational sensex soars to new heights each year, with 90-per-cent-plus being regarded as ‘peanuts’, schools are struggling to transact normal curriculum. Add to this the pressure of IIT tuitions (as also for medicine and a host of other post-school programmes), and who has the time to stop and stare? Moreover, this hugely pressurized scenario creates a certain culture of its own, a culture where cut-throat competition is the order of the day, where “the devil take the hindmost” becomes the beacon for all. Thus cheating in examinations, dealing in ‘leaked’ question papers, invigilators winking at the use of unfair means, or ganging up against a peer in order to get hold of his notes have become routine phenomena in most schools. The educational sensex may be touching unrealistic heights, but the country is paying a heavy price for the bloodbath following in its wake.

There is undoubtedly a serious flaw in the system. But there is undeniably an equally serious flaw in the manner in which parents and schools are responding to some of the larger issues that are being thrown up by society at large.

Let me illustrate by giving an example. In one of the schools that I happen to have headed, there was a perennial problem with false medical certificates being submitted by parents in order to avail themselves of extra leave for their wards. I made repeated pleas to the parents to desist from this practice, saying that this violated the sacred trust that should exist between school and parent. One Monday morning, when confronted with two medical certificates from a town about six hours drive from the school, I drove straight to the nursing home from where these certificates had emanated. What followed was sheer embarrassment all round. The doctors were seriously embarrassed, as were the parents, and I wondered what the two little boys thought of it all? But we do this sort of thing everyday without batting an eyelid. Take, for instance, when the phone rings and we ask our children to tell the caller Papa is not at home. What message does the child get? Lying is ‘cool’, I guess. If Papa can lie, so can I.

Take this a step further. How many parents stop their children from driving without a licence or a helmet? As a matter-of-fact, I have heard parents loudly boasting that their son is only 12 years old, but absolutely adept at handling the family car. And then when our children get into such situations as the BMW or the Jessica Lal case, we hire the best lawyers to make sure they escape punishment. Schools today are hugely constrained in the matter of enforcing discipline because parents resort to the courts at the drop of a hat. And limited as they are for time and money, no school has the wherewithal to open up yet another front.

Teachers, too, do not help matters when all they perceive their role to be is to make sure that the syllabus is completed. How many of us try and relate what we are teaching to some kind of value system? More fundamentally, how many of us are capable of doing so? When one has to make lateral connections between one’s subject matter and the outside world, one should have developed a vision and a world-view. That, in turn, assumes that one should have read widely. How many of us teachers today have even read a book? We are quite content to spend our spare time watching all the soaps on television, and yet we blame the children for watching too much TV.

Teachers often forget that pupils observe them very closely, and would like to treat them as role-models. But when we deliberately skip portions in the classroom in order to fatten our tuition market, when we make no attempt to upgrade our skills or knowledge but are content to deliver ‘bazaar-notes’, when we indulge in petty politics and gossip and form ‘groups’ in school, what inspiration can we provide our pupils?

One of the greatest failures of independent India, to my mind, has been our failure to develop a single teacher-training institute that has the same brand-equity as, say, the IIMs or IITs. We have millions of fly-by-night B.Ed institutes, but not one that commands national or international stature as the IITs and IIMs do. And yet we continue to parrot that “the future of this country lies with its children”. What hope for the future when we are not willing to invest in education?

The next time, therefore, that we sit in our drawing-rooms and bemoan the fate of our country, let us take a close, hard look at ourselves. As parents and teachers, we owe it to the nation to constantly remind ourselves of the old adage, “Physician, heal thyself!”

The author is headmaster, Welham Boys School, Dehra Dun