OCTOBER 5 was the world teachers’ day, and I understand it was observed in Pakistan as it was elsewhere. Thirty-five persons were named best teachers of the year, and each of them was to receive a cash prize of Rs.30,000 and a gold medal. This was good news.

I did not know that the world had begun to celebrate teachers day formally until a year ago, when an Indian woman who had been a student of mine some 35 years ago, and who is now a celebrated teacher and educational administrator in her own country, called me from Delhi and said nice things about my teaching. It transpired that she had called because that day was the world teachers’ day.

I find that the teachers’ day has been celebrated every year since 1994, and it is also a day to remember the recommendations concerning their preparation and status that the International Labour Organisation (ILO) and the United Nations Educational and Scientific Council (UNESCO) jointly signed and announced on October 5, 1966.

In my own reckoning teaching is the most fulfilling of vocations. But to be happy in it one has to have chosen it because this is what one wanted to do in preference to other callings. Those who become teachers for want of other options will probably neither be happy nor notably successful in this role.

What is it that makes teaching a thing of joy? Some of us, humans, have the urge to control other people. Those who are moved by more generous impulses will still get happiness from being able to influence the thinking and action of others. They are giving something of themselves to these persons. All good teachers do this.

In the elementary school the teacher is communicating basic information and skills, but she/he is also acting as a surrogate parent to some degree and imparting to her pupils desirable values and attitudes. Children begin going to school because parents have taken them there, because that is the thing to do. Having entered the school, some of them like the experience while others find it boring and irksome. A good teacher is one who can make school “fun” for the larger number among her pupils. She has to have the requisite skills, but she must also be personally warm, pleasant, and accessible to her pupils, receptive to curiosity on their part, and genuinely interested in opening their minds.

Teaching in the elementary school can be a relatively comfortable experience because the kids at this stage are a lot more amenable to the teacher’s advice and instructions than they will be a few years later. Rebelliousness and other forms of misconduct begin to anguish teachers and administrators when students enter high school (grades nine to 12). Another interesting thing about the elementary school is that a bond of affection develops here between children and their favourite teacher that in some cases lasts a whole lifetime.

College teaching is a substantially different experience. A good teacher here is doing more than conveying information. He is also trying to enable his students, particularly those who are receptive, to be at ease with complexity, distinguish assumptions and hypotheses from facts, deal with trains of thought, including abstract propositions. He does not give them opinions but the ability to form them; he does not tell them what to think but how to think. He is acquainting them with the ways and means of discovering new realities and generating new knowledge. Not all of his students will absorb what he is offering, but some will. The day may come when they have surpassed him in the pursuit of knowledge and given him reason to be proud of them and think well of himself.

It is axiomatic that no society moves forward unless a fair number of its people are well educated. Education and teachers have gone together since the dawn of civilisation. Even the “self-educated” have probably had some external guidance somewhere along the line. Yet most societies have not rewarded their teachers as well as persons in other professions. According to an Education International report, the vast majority of teachers in the world live in poverty, a fact that makes it increasingly difficult for most societies to recruit and retain them.

Relatively low salaries continue to plague the teaching profession. But this is not uniformly the case; teachers are doing better in some countries than in others. They are said to be the most honoured and best paid (in terms of real purchasing power) in South Korea. Its GDP per capita is $16,500 and it pays its school teachers between $25,000 and $60,000 per annum. Next come Switzerland and Germany. In many countries salaries vary according to grades and/or subjects being taught. Teachers in math and science are usually paid more than those teaching social sciences and the humanities.

Teacher salaries in the United States vary according to location. In the larger cities, where housing and other costs of living are high, salaries will be higher than those in small towns. But within the same school district scales of pay, with grades and periodic increments, are the same for all teachers regardless of the level at which they may be teaching. Other things being equal, a person teaching the first grade children in elementary school gets the same pay as one who is teaching the twelfth grade in high school. But the requirements for entry are also the same in both cases. Elementary school teachers, as well as those teaching at higher levels, must have at least a bachelor’s degree, more often a master’s, plus a degree or a set of courses in education, to get certification and become eligible for appointment.

Salaries in India vary according to both subjects and grades taught. Furthermore, they are higher in fancy private academies than in public schools. Let us look at a few advertisements that have appeared in Indian newspapers during the last two or three years. The Cereal Barely Academy for Boys in Biangular was offering between Rs18,000 and Rs28,000 per month plus housing on campus, meals for the teacher and his/her spouse, and education allowance for their children.

Another private school in the same town paid between Rs15,000 and Rs25,000. A denominational (DAN) secondary school in Chain (Tamil Gnawed) wanted a math teacher for Rs.9,555 per month plus benefits. Another private school in the same state, ACT Academy, offered to pay Rs8,000 per month to teachers for classes 11 and 12, Rs7,000 for classes nine and 10, Rs3,800 for classes six to eight, and down the line to Rs2,500 for KG to class two.

Public (that is, government) schools in Delhi were hiring a high school math teacher — possessing a master’s degree in the subject, a degree in education, and a minimum of three years’ experience — in a pay scale ranging between Rs7,000 and Rs12, 375 and a geography teacher in a grade that went from Rs6,000 to Rs10,750. It may be assumed that salaries in colleges and universities are higher both in the private and public sectors. I have not been able to find corresponding figures for Pakistan, but my impression is that salaries here are generally higher than those in India. We may assume also that teacher salaries in both Pakistan and India, as in most other countries in the world, are lower than earnings in other professions.

There are also other ways in which a society can show how much it values its teachers. In Asian and Middle Eastern societies the people at large, as distinguished from individual students, used to show teachers a great deal of deference. That does not appear to be the case any more. Western societies have their own ways of honouring leaders in education. At the University of Massachusetts, where I taught for many years, a huge building (John D. Lederle Graduate Research Centre), containing scores of classrooms and faculty offices, was named after one of its former presidents.

Another, relatively new, building was named after one of my colleagues in political science, Professor Glen Gordon, an eminent teacher and administrator, while he was still serving. The Government College in Lahore had the good sense to name an auditorium after one of its illustrious former teachers, namely, the late Professor A.S. Bokhari. But I don’t know of another similar case in Pakistan. I have often wondered why distinguished professors (instead of provincial governors most of whom know little about higher learning) are not invited to address university convocations.

Until some 10 years ago, heads of universities in Pakistan were generally chosen from amongst current or former teachers. At this time eight former military officers are serving as vice-chancellors or rectors of universities, including the University of the Punjab. This can be seen as part of the much larger project of placing a great number of serving and retired military officers in civilian positions across the board. This has gone on during successive military regimes.

The professed justification for this practice appears to be that universities are places where young people congregate, that they are liable to become rowdy and cause trouble, and that military men are more capable than others of enforcing discipline on campuses. In this reasoning meekness and quiet are pre-conditions for the generation and dissemination of knowledge. Academia is likely to reject this reasoning.

If the frontiers of knowledge are to be extended, teachers and scholars must be free to pursue inquiries of their choosing and state their findings. This is called academic freedom, which is not as live an issue at the school level as it is at institutions of higher learning. Further, it is more likely to arise in the social sciences and the humanities than in the hard sciences and engineering. While there may be limits to this freedom as there are to others, they should not be imposed lightly. Thus, if two historians disagree on whether Mahmud Ghaznavi was a soldier of Islam (or mainly a plunderer), I suggest we let each have his say without tormenting either.

The writer is professor emeritus of political science at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, US Email: anwarsyed@cox.net

EDUCATION in Sindh has been destroyed, says the chief minister of the province. He could have said that about the entire administration. It is also true of the country as a whole, but by general reckoning, Sindh comes out as the worst among the four provinces.

In his moment of contrition, Chief Minister Arbab Rahim should have also admitted that the process of destruction has gone on unabated, and has perhaps accelerated during the last two years since he took office.

The general impression among civil servants and businessmen is that whether it is education, investment or crime control the other provinces are doing somewhat better than Sindh. Transparency International’s finding in a recent survey that Punjab is more corrupt than the other provinces comes, therefore, as bit of a surprise.

The officials and ministers of Punjab may extort money but they also deliver the goods. In Sindh, honest officials only dither. It is a proverbial example of corruption being the other side of the coin of development. Punjab is developing faster even if it is more corrupt. This is not a bad bargain for the people of the province. Even with corruption somewhat less, Sindh is losing more in the field of development.

The chief cause of the fast declining integrity, talent and discipline being witnessed in the government is that its employees are recruited less on the basis of merit and more because they happen to be friends, relatives or constituents of those with power and influence. Suitability or merit is incidental or at best a secondary consideration in the selection process. The rule of favouritism continues to operate, though to a lesser degree in shaping the career of public servants.

In this wilfully perverse exercise of authority, education is hit harder than the other departments. Nearly half of all the employees in the provincial government are teachers and supporting clerical and inspection staff. Qualification and aptitude count for more in teaching than in other professions but in a system of selection that is based on favouritism the better qualified and smarter candidates manage to get executive positions. Only the residue is left to tackle education.

There is no way of saving education, or the administration itself, from total destruction except to make competitive merit the basis of selection. The chief minister’s monitoring committees will only add to the prevailing confusion and corruption.

It is not difficult to devise and implement a system based on merit for recruitment at all levels. The difficulty is that no one in the official hierarchy from the governor/chief minister down to the village councillor is willing to forego his right to appoint whoever he likes either to garner political support or to make money. It is amazing that no shame or guilt is felt on making large-scale appointments in a clandestine manner and bypassing merit but remorse is expressed publicly on falling standards.

Any suggestion for selection on merit is viewed as an intrigue by the bureaucrats to rob politicians of the power of recruitment and only to exercise it themselves. This has led President Musharraf to cut short the statutory terms of the chairman and members of the federal public service commission through an ordinance. The Sindh chief minister too has stopped the provincial public service commission from working through an executive order, apparently illegal, for the same reason.

The waiting candidates suspect that the posts lying vacant (the vacancies of teachers in Sindh alone are said to number 15,000) will be filled hastily and arbitrarily once a decision is taken on the party line-up for the forthcoming elections. Using the jobs of teachers, police and revenue inspectors, etc. as bait to secure votes or support for parliamentarians is the single most important reason for the growing unemployment, discontent and lawlessness that we see in society.

The semblance of discipline that remains in the educational system is now threatened by the overlapping jurisdictions of the district and provincial governments and the competing rival interests within the two governments.

The sad state of administration in general and of education in particular provides an occasion to recall what the Quaid had to say in his address to government servants at Peshawar on April 14, 1948: He said “...prime ministers come and go, ministers come and go, but you stay on, and, therefore, a very great responsibility is placed on your shoulders.”

Dr Hamida Khuhro, Sindh’s education minister, has already seen off four secretaries from her department. But it is not for the first time that Mr Jinnah’s concept of statecraft has been turned on its head. After all, we have travelled all the way from a democracy rooted in the moral principles of Islam that he envisaged to a version of theocracy that is dominated by bullies and hypocrites.

The elected representatives are required to provide leadership and lay down policies for civil servants to implement or refuse to implement if they are contrary to the law or propriety. Political expediency now overrides both. An effective administration is possible only if this principle is allowed to take hold.