The latest issue of The New Yorker has a toon with this caption: “Listen, when you give up, you can do anything!” This one is obviously a lampoon aimed to shame the shirker, the shammer, or the one who whines and avoids any responsibility. Such people are everywhere. I was one of this tribe once and I regret those times because there is a lot that I have lost.
Shirking is easy. As a GC at the IMA, I recollect having complained of everything from a knee pain to a muscle cramp simply to be told to stand on the edge of the PT ground while the rest of my course-mates sweated it out with jogs, runs, sprints, and other exercises. As a consequence, it was I who ended up being a struggler when it came to the BPETs and other tests. I lost. A lot. Years went by and I learned my lessons the hard way.
This example is just to let you know that shirking is as much a villainous menace in the education system as it is for doctors, engineers, or any other professional. Let me give you an example of a fictional Dr X who is a Class I Gazetted Officer posted in a college… and there are hundreds of people like him spread all over the our network of universities, colleges, and institutes. Teaching in a college, as we all know, is no longer just about ambling into a classroom and dictating stale notes year after year. There are tens of other allied duties that need attention and this includes everything from conducting examinations to overseeing purchases… from guiding students during activities to ensuring that the financial system runs smoothly… from managing schemes proposed by the ministries to routine management of action plans.
Let me digress a bit to tell you that magical intervention does not keep our cantonments always spick and span with everything running smoothly. The officers aren’t simply wearing their starched uniforms with all the glamorous bits dangling from here and there, waiting for some war to begin somewhere. Every officer is assigned duties ranging from administration to financial management and they accept and learn on the job and do all this besides looking after the fitness of their troops. Do they whine and say: ‘This is not my job’ or ‘This isn’t what I am paid for’? In comparison, most of our colleges and universities are a mess… and this is why the entire education system dithers and totters.
Shirkers like the fictional Dr X in this essay are the kind who are never willing to accept any allied duty… and when handed one, they whine, protest, cajole and threat. They bungle everything they are asked to do, as if proving that a steep learning curve disorients them. They stoop to every tactic known to them to be rid of any responsibility or accountability. Something tells me that the only thing they can do is filing RTIs and voicing grievances during meetings. All they understand is how to avoid work. Learning does not interest them. Can such people be trusted to teach? And anyway, what are they going to teach? All they have learned is the devious art of shirking.
There are hundreds of shirkers like Dr X strutting along the hallowed corridors of teaching temples… and it is time that they are asked to leave the art of teaching to those who understand and practice brilliance and diligence, those who aren’t afraid of steep learning curves and those who willingly volunteer to accept responsibilities to keep an institution running as it must.
Those faculty members who strut around dressed like an idiot out to guide shirkers must finally make way for others because teaching in India is on the verge of a revolution!
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Note: This article was first published in Education Post – October 2020 as the editorial
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Arvind Passey
Written on 29 September 2020
