We are living today in a world of continuous and breath-taking change. Yet change is an inevitable part of our life and education is one area which cannot escape change. Infact, our educational system needs urgent and sweeping changes, adding up to the greatest need of all: a new breed of teachers for the new millennium.
The new millennium teachers must ready themselves for the new breed of students they will encounter in the coming years: young human beings who are influenced by the media like never before, some of them coming from disturbed homes and broken families. They are under tremendous peer pressure and must keep themselves afloat in a sea of competition. As a result, they exhibit a certain restlessness which they cannot handle without the caring touch of a teacher. All this happened yesterday. But today the demands are so enormously different!
The students of today possess short attention and concentration spans and tire easily of routine teaching methods. They are filled with abundant energy, which must be channelized in the right direction. The kind of students we encounter today demand that our teaching techniques and our whole approach to them changes. For we need to take them in the context of the development taking place in the scientific, technological and social fields, of which they are an integral part.
The teachers of the new millennium, therefore, can no longer be content with merely imparting knowledge and facts, which often become outdated even as they are being taught. They are called upon to be facilitators of learning, acquainting the young with the use of media and technology and helping them to access and acquire information. They need to teach their students skills and techniques to discover facts for themselves, helping them to grasp and assimilate concepts which they will retain for life.
In the past, teachers recommended books and encyclopedias, which their students could read and refer to. Today they need to recommend portals and websites. For all this they must be in a continuous learning mode themselves. The challenges, therefore, that the new millennium holds out before them are indeed frightening. They necessitate not only a rethinking and resetting of priorities and methodologies, but a whole new process of learning, wherein the teacher must become a student, everyday, before standing before the class.
However, before everything else, the teacher must strive to be a better teacher with every passing day. He cannot afford to remain fossilized in the knowledge and the pedagogy that he learnt during his student days. For he should not lose sight of the fact that a teacher is basically a builder. He builds individual personalities, he builds a society, he builds the whole nation. Does the educational set-up help the emergence of such teachers?
Indeed, the time to update the existing educational system in order to meet the various challenges of a teacher in the new millennium is now. May modern day teachers be imbued with a spirit of dedication, professionalism and, above all, realism.
Happy Teachers’ Day!
