III - COMMON DANGERS TO GUARD AGAINST IN TEACHING

There are thievish little dangers in the profession that rise out of the ground, as it were, to get hold of the teacher. It will take some vigilance, even a degree of pluck, to give these dangers the slip. But if one is not able to escape them, whatever be one's worth, one loses that power of personality which, above all other things, in the teaching profession keeps the teacher's work from going barren.

Some of these lesser dangers with regard to which the teacher has always to be `on the Qui vive' are anger, intolerance, partiality, the popularity mania, rivalry and discontent.

The present is so real and insistent that most of us are apt to forget the past. Men and women do not always remember the supreme fact that once they were children. Such short memory is highly injurious to the teacher. For anger is nearly always the result of incomplete understanding. If one wants to understand a boy, one might do worse than recall one's own boyhood. If the teacher has so completely cut himself off from the days of his boyhood as to be incapable of recollecting at least their more vivid outlines, he should not know a boy when he sees one. He hides his inability to see the living motives in boy-behaviour in an exhibition of anger loftily posed before his pupils. It is part of kind Nature's colour-scheme to provide her creatures with some means or other of disguising their defects and defenceless states and securing, as far and as long as possible, self-protection. And since it is Nature that provides the means, the disguise is not always conscious. The teacher does not usually `put on the boards' his anger. He simply goes for the class, and he goes for it without much searchings of heart because he does not know the origin of his excitement. He must know it and knowing it, try to keep anger out of the way.

For anger can possibly do him no good under any circumstance. It always lowers him in the estimation of the boys. Anger amuses more often than it intimidates. In the result it produces, anger is like superficial wit. The raging and the jesting teacher starting from different places to different places reaches the same place.

The teacher must have complete hold of himself at all times, firstly, because good teaching demands it, and secondly, because anger would argue a serious imperfection in himself which does not go with real education. Anger is an effervescence that poisons personality, that pollutes that sense of beauty which should be among the highest aims of the teacher to impart to his pupils. It is a wide world we live in and even anger, the accursed, may have a place in it, but in schools where life is sought to be fashioned after the best models, we cannot afford it a place. If not cause, howsoever grave, can put the teacher's `monkey up', that unrepentant dear thing will lend some of its architectural fancies to the structure that he is trying to build.

Intolerance is a form of anger more dangerous than the plain thing we call temper, because it sometimes wears a seemly look and delivers itself in dignified phrases. Intolerance is a bad word but it always goes about with the scent of some good word or other on it. For example, it now calls itself progress, now conscience, now courage, in fact, anything that has, won a niche in the approbation of men. In a country like India where people follow different religions, intolerance is thrice-dangerous. Religious intolerance is the commonest vice of mankind. It often becomes a habit and sometimes even enters heredity. The teaching profession in India has a special responsibility resting on it. Catholicity of views in religious matters is one of the most pressing needs of India today. The teacher has to set a living example of what such catholicity may be like. The question of religious instruction in schools has for sometime past been assuming some importance, off and on. Religious instruction, of which more is reserved for a subsequent chapter, is as excellent as `godless' education is obnoxious, but if religious instruction were to lead to accentuation of the superficial differences between faiths, we cannot in all conscience charge it with the high mission of getting all peoples to accept a common standard of spiritual excellence, which certainly must be the goal of all religious teaching. The best religious instruction is to be derived from the example of the teacher and the instruments he employs in teaching. It is, however, easy for a teacher to import into the class the common biases of the street and this is often done. It also relieves him to some extent to share the prejudices with his pupils and this, too, is often done. Young boys and girls are not always able to resist the sinister influence of such moods and tenses of the teacher's personality and that is why intolerance of whatever sort in the teacher is to be highly deprecated.

Partiality is very often traceable to intolerance. When intolerance becomes bold enough to speak through partiality, the days of its life fortunately are numbered. A powerful teacher may be able to preserve partiality for some time but not for long. When partiality goes down out it usually drags its author along with it. Partiality is very powerful and because it is so it lays hold of some teachers now and then. Intolerance and partiality make themselves attractive by promising a degree of `influence' to their friends. The intolerant and partial teacher often enjoys the support of some `class-consciousness' in the school. That is a strange thing to find in any educational institution but it is often found, and is proof of the educational decadence to which we can liable in modern times.

An ounce of partiality is enough to destroy a ton of good teaching. The partial teacher stands condemned in the judgement of the class. He can give no right impulses to his student. He cannot teach who has been `sacked' by the consciences of his pupils. He may, however, continue to be a teacher to the detriment of the school. When one speaks about partiality, one feels as if one were slinging ink and is eager to stop. What has been said because the existence of partiality in education is not as nearly imaginary as partiality is bad.

Almost all young teachers, new to their work, want to become popular among their pupils. This is not in itself anything bad. The desire for popularity is a good enough thing but genuine popularity which is always seasoned with respect, does not alight on the teacher ready-made from the heavens. It takes him years to get it if he is destined to get it at all. It takes him some work to get it, Popularity untouched with respect is distinctly worse than useless. When a young teacher develops a `popularity- mania', the employs whatever means is handy to satisfy his craving. He chums up `with the boys, talks `shop' with them, tells them tales' out of school'. The `little beasts' unwilling to cast off their `little ways' at the bidding of the older teachers adore the new-comer with all their `little hearts'. It does not take any ability to sell oneself at a cheap price. The ability of the teacher should be proved by his power to elevate his pupils and getting them to like him at the same time. We cannot educate any one joy making education all beer and skittles. The `popularity-mania' induces the teacher to go down to, rather than to raise, his pupils.

It is a well-known fact, in the sense that what is not good easily gets wind, that amity among teachers is more desired and sought than found. As far as teachers are concerned, the thing called resprite de corps or sense of belonging to a community, has often to flourish on occasional does of lip-service and if it does not fictually flourish the cause is known. Teachers have the greatest need to know one another because they work on the same material. If several artists make a piece of sculpture by turns they cannot afford to be ignorant of what their fellows have been doing and how. Intelligent co-operation must be the basis of their work if success is to be attained at all. Yet among teachers, who closely resemble the artists we have been contemplating mutual sympathy and understanding are more often not seen than seen. A sort of secret rivalry would seen to animate the teachers belonging to the same school and often teaching the very same boys. This is very intriguing, to say the least of it.

What might be the reasons? Is it because moving among immature minds they unconsciously imbibe some of the imperections to which these minds are naturally subject? Is it because he spirit of emulation which comes to workers in the same field and perhaps ought to come acted upon by unfavourable circumstances swiftly changes its nature and turns to rivalry? There is no doubt something rotten in the State of Denmark. That something perhaps is the emoluments side of the profession, its commercial competition side, not a good thing to be found in schools at any rate. Of course there are things in the world like currying favour cathing backstair-influence crooking knees and stealing marches. And these are naturally more prominent in stake than in private education a circumstance that makes a strong case against state interference in education wherever the state has not completely dropped its oligarchio character to which all states cling as long and as emotionally as possible. Be it as it may rivalry among teachers is very harmful to education. It intensifies their natural aversion to society which promotes a baneful communalism among them and engenders in them an evil egotism a spurious individuality an injurious reluctance to pull well and together which are not quite hospitable to the benefits that education holds out. It must try the teacher to keep fighting always against these many enemies. But to fight against evil is his real job in life and directly he lays down arms he must cease to be teacher.

Regarding discontent it might at once be said that every one is entitled to it provided it is the right sort which is seldom to be had. Discontent is very good if it leads to individual and collective effort to change the state of affairs that gives it rise. The trouble is that discontent seldom does that. The power of discontent lies rather in killing effort and creating gloom. There is gloom enough already in the teaching professional although happily it is yet too early to pronounce effort dead. An Inspector of Schools whose intimate experience covers a couple of hundreds of them cries. They are seething with discontent. When this write `commenced author' which is not so very long ago bringing out a volume or two a prominent educationist to whom he had reached a complimentary copy wrote him saying `.I find it quite interesting. Most teachers feel too depressed even to dream .". It was a gracious communication such as must make any teacher blush crimson. No teacher worth his salt can permit charges of discontent and depression go undared. Nothing is easier than to nurse discontent and say that the times are out of joint. The teacher to whom is given the glorious company of young boys and girls just peeping out delightedly into the world can never safely come near the gentle art of making a long face. Nobody has any business to play the skeleton at the feast, and possibly no good can ever come out of the gratuitous part. It is the duty of the teacher to go about his work smiling while sparing no effort to make things better than be finds them. He owes it to himself no less than to the young under his care.

These lesser dangers, on which we have been chatting somewhat digressively are not really as lesser as they might appear. In fact, we do not know if there are greater dangers. Unless the teacher is always on his guard against them, he will have fallen from good, long before he comes to know it. To live under the caves of danger is stimulation, and in a profession in which stimulation counts for so much a sense of danger must be all to the good. Let not that sense go to sleep.