The learners are missing

The basic problem today is that everyone searches for a teacher. There are people who want someone to teach them how to write, how to invest, how to paint or draw or sketch, how to read faster, how to overcome fear or even how to think logically. These people assume that some teacher will magically appear and help them master whatever it is that they wish to be good at. They even look at books to be their ultimate teachers enabling everything from the art of wooing to using a smartphone. Some think that podcasts and videos are the best teachers… and thus the incessant demand for teachers in both the real and the virtual world is what we see today.

Why I call this a problem is because people forget that they need to first be learners and that this is what is missing. Take me, for instance. I have spent decades searching for this elusive teacher who will suddenly appear and teach me painting, sketching, and drawing simply because I thought this was something I wanted to do. Every time I have entered a store it was invariably the art materials section that held my attention and over the years I have spent time and money to buy stuff that I hardly ever used… everything from pencils and sketch pens to water, acrylic and even oil paints, from blank canvases to expensive sketch-books. I have watched colours in tubes and sketch pens go dry and canvases get worn on the edges. All because I was waiting for some teacher to magically appear and teach me how to fill pages with lines and colours. This never happened until… yes, until I decided to just open a sketch-book and start drawing.

The day I completed my first doodle I knew I was a registered learner. Well, by this time I had discovered that the internet was full of people willing to tell everything they knew about drawing, sketching, and painting… and my learning increased. So did the force of teaching because I suddenly began meeting people who knew art inside-out and they were always willing to offer tips. Visits to art galleries began. I began stumbling upon social media updates where art was in focus and art websites and portals too appeared as if they were all waiting for me to take the first step.

Learning and the wish to be a learner, I guess, is what pushes the right teachers to our side. It is almost like Confucius telling the world that when a student is ready, the teacher shall appear.

The strange thing is that when I look around I also find that most of us are complaining about the lack of good teachers. This is a universal malady and the source of this disease probably springs from the fact that we tend to be unrealistic about teachers. As a novice doodler it would not be justifiable for me to wish for the best artists to somehow appear and tell me how they paint. However, it is equally justifiable to say that the best artists are there to inspire the best students. What this means is that to yearn for top notch teachers we need to first prove that we are the most deserving students or learners. The same logic applies to everything in life. Those nations where the citizen have transcended lowly temptations to survive on doles and subsidies start getting leaders who then pull the country upwards towards glory. The same is with teachers. We often complain about the lack of good teachers… but then we forget that good teachers are probably diverted to good learners. It is important to emerge as a good learner and then whatever your teachers communicate will be full of relevance.

It is reasonable to say that good learners have a higher propensity to attract good teachers. My conversations with teachers are generally full of their telling me that students today are neither interested in attending classes nor in learning and that all they want are precise guide lines to scoring good marks. The students, on the other hand, lament about their teachers not going beyond what is essential from the examination point-of-view. This impasse can end only if students first strive to be good learners and if teachers learn to look beyond the syllabus to make subjects full of interesting insights. Quite obviously then, it is both who need to be learners first.

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Arvind Passey
14 April 2019