Why would anyone want to become a teacher?
Those who can, do; those who can't, teach." This statement remains, to this day, one of the most incorrect sentences to have existed on earth. Aristotle said it better, "Those that know, do. Those that understand, teach." But then, teaching is doing. It's doing what many don't have the courage or patience to do; it's the act of passing on the knowledge that has sustained generation after generation, selflessly, to children who are not your own. It's one of the noblest things a person can choose to do with their life. But sadly, that's not the narrative that exists today—at least not in the case of teaching at earlier levels of education, in school and colleges, in Bangladesh.
Today, rarely anybody in Bangladesh would want to become a school teacher or a college teacher. One reason might be low pay and, associatively, the rhetoric of lesser social status—so much so that teaching is less lucrative than a high-salary job in a multinational company. And who can blame us?
For all latest news, follow The Daily Star's Google News channel. The problem is that we have created a system where professions like researching and teaching are, most often, not as highly ranked on the salary scale as entertainment or sports, which means that our teachers and doctors end up going on strikes for a better pay while an actor or a cricketer can think about buying a second or third house. I'm not arguing that teaching is more worthy of a high salary than acting, but that we have no such hierarchy where teaching is at the bottom of the career ladder.
Unfortunately, with such stark differences in salaries across these jobs, we do automatically create an invisible (or visible) hierarchy, where children would aim to become highly paid social influencers rather than teachers or scientists. At the end of the day, the narrative we set matters, and what we pay—money—is a powerful weapon in setting this narrative.
But, does this mean that increasing teachers' salaries will solve our problems? Not necessarily, because there are other important aspects that matter too. Remember, no matter what teachers are paid, there's still corruption. The corruption in how teachers are recruited as well as the lack of professionalism and the rampant toxicity that teachers have to endure once they become teachers.
We'd be making another mistake by assuming that merely increasing teachers' pay will fix our education system. A World Bank study in 2016, based in Indonesia, found that raising teachers' salaries without changing anything else in the system didn't make them more effective teachers and didn't improve their students' test scores. However, the intervention did have some positive effects on teachers' satisfaction. Could the same be true in the case of Bangladesh?
Additionally, how much of a salary increase will actually enable teachers to comfortably and happily thrive in their profession? How much of a raise will guarantee that teachers will stop being tempted to turn to coaching centres and private tutoring? What can we do so that more and more students will actually happily aim for teaching as a career choice? We need to be able to answer these questions with rigorous and objective evidence.
The other part of the puzzle is ensuring teacher quality and ascertaining what we actually mean by a good teacher. Is a good teacher a brilliant teacher—knowledgeable and wise? What if they are knowledgeable but arrogant and unkind? Would they still be good teachers? You see, we often talk about incentivising our "best" students to go into teaching without realising that this is problematic if we continue to define "best" by grades and CGPAs, without accounting for factors such as kindness, ethics and morality.
These factors are as important for university teachers as they are for school and college teachers. Interestingly, when it comes to university teachers, the rhetoric changes completely. An inspiring school teacher may deserve recognition but does not receive it as easily as a university teacher in Bangladesh. Arguably, today, university teachers who might not deserve any respect are crowding out good university teachers who actually deserve it. In such circumstances, nobody can blame an honest and ethical university teacher for becoming frustrated at having to endure in a system that has failed to serve its purpose.
Honestly, how can we blame our students for not having a backbone if we teachers fail to show ours? While our system owes our school and college teachers a better platform, undoubtedly, our university teachers owe our system better service—service to the nation, to discussing and debating solutions for our nation's problems, to guiding our people, to the truth.
Perhaps this much is certain: if our teachers are meant to be our torchbearers for the next generations, we need to understand that teachers don't only pass on knowledge—they play pivotal roles in passing on values, too. First, we have to agree on what values we want them to pass on. What values matter to us collectively as a society? Do we even prioritise values? If we did, would we be in the mess we are in now?
Rubaiya Murshed is a PhD researcher at the Faculty of Education, University of Cambridge. She is also a lecturer (on study leave) at the Department of Economics, University of Dhaka.
Views expressed in this article are the author's own.
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