Being a teacher I find bribing morally demeaning. Many fellow teachers feel the same way as I do but everyone seems helpless before the practice of corruption. The following is an honest account of personal experiences of serving in the Higher Education Department Punjab for more than two decades. My position as a participant and observer gives me an advantage of having first-hand information but it can also put me in a difficult spot. Still keeping silent will not be right when one is witness to the degeneration of the collective soul of society.

Education, in broader terms, aims at fostering the values of honesty and fair play in society. But is the organisational culture of the education department promoting or demoting the core value of honesty? Don’t our leaders and policy makers know that a centralised system coupled with the inaccessibility of top officials is a recipe for corrupt practices? What useful purpose is served by a frustratingly sluggish proper channel except providing opportunities to sit on files? With such putrid organisational culture, can the higher education department attract and retain the motivated, committed and capable teachers?

How can over reliance on bureaucratic impositions without providing training and motivation help in the learning process?

Teachers are expected to transmit values such as honesty, integrity and professionalism. But in doing that the wrath of the system eventually marginalises and demoralises them. The decadence is so pervasive that getting routine approvals for things such as getting NOCs for studying, passports, leave from work, MPhil/PhD allowance from the administrative offices, tests one’s integrity and patience.

Let us see how things work out. The sacrosanct bureaucratic procedures, by default, facilitate corruption. The administrative structure generally designed to process each and every petty request is too cumbersome and lengthy. A simple routine request must go through an unnecessarily long proper channel with three intermediary offices (out of five) working merely as a post office. The people in these offices would just sit on or turn down a file on trivial pretexts. Interestingly, the same clerks would operate quite efficiently through a parallel stealth fast track for those who can pay for quick service. But here is the moral dilemma: going through proper channel means delayed response or nothing at all, so it taxes one in terms of mobility (both horizontal and vertical) and thus career advancement.

However, opting for the later course requires pleasing/bribing the clerks/superintendents/SOs. After being compelled to sell one’s soul so often and so cheap one can hardly stand before the students to teach morality. We can’t teach values just like teaching a lesson; it involves setting an example through character.

Against this backdrop, keeping the teaching spirit alive becomes the most challenging task. Even a simple transaction with the administrative office drains a lot of positive energy. Here, let me give some concrete examples from my long tryst with education. I joined as lecturer, securing the first merit position in the Punjab. Throughout these years no class of mine fell below the results of the board or the university. I did my MPhil and right now my PhD is close to completion. But still I am working in the same grade that I joined more than 23 years ago. I don’t know why I don’t deserve a promotion because the department has never formally informed me about the reasons.

However, I know that many and much more junior colleagues than me have been promoted. Legally, a teacher has nothing to do with the promotion process but in practice he is asked to produce his own confidential reports and keep pursuing the case all along the long route called proper channel. This is symptomatic of the complex problem — a poor service structure, and faulty promotion procedure. Perhaps, no other department can match the education department in its tardiness regarding promotions. One can imagine how demotivating it is.

Now turning to the academic environment, obviously educational organisations can’t work well in the image of bureaucratic organisations but this is something that is hardly recognised. The core activity of education is learning and teaching; it needs relaxed, participatory and egalitarian ethos instead of rigidity and hierarchy — a hallmark of the existing organisational culture. It can neither help nor inspire. It is not suggested here that teachers should not be evaluated; that they must be. However, the best judges of a teacher’s performance could be his pupils, peers, parents and society at large, not the authority alone.

Strange enough, none of them matters in the official evaluation system.

Consequently, it’s not the quality of teaching that matters but the blessings of the principal, since he is the one writing the Annual Confidential Report or ACR.

Moreover, external discipline has its limits, creating an enabling environment is more important. But the traditional approach places emphasis on certain standard impositions which have hardly helped to improve the quality of education. Just one example suffices here, officials would always stress on the maintenance of attendance registers but interestingly none of the best teachers has been so particular about marking attendance. But one can only wonder why our administrative mind abhors commonsensical things. Educational organisations need leaders capable to motivate and command respect. But unfortunately we have got more controllers, more regulations and less academic freedom and substance.

Still there is another side of the story. The administration often fails to act where it must act. I personally know some exceptionally blessed gentlemen who willfully remained absent for years, came back, got reinstatement, arrears and promotions from the same administration that habitually keeps a punitive posture.

Unfortunately, those who believe that teaching is indeed a noble, constructive and respectable vocation, and join it by choice, have to bear the brunt. Such ethical ambivalence regarding the reward system is questioning the very foundations of our value system. If the honest and committed teachers remain caught in the tentacles of corrupt organisational culture, where can our values come from? With this appeal to the conscience of the society to whom we all owe a higher level of commitment, I do hope that it won’t be a cry in wilderness.

The writer is working as a lecturer in the higher education department in Punjab.