The roots of education are bitter, but the fruit is sweet.-Aristotle

Around 250 million children around the world cannot read, write, or do basic arithmetic, although many of them have been in school for some years. “Schooling Ain’t Learning” states the subtitle of the excellent book from Lant Pritchett, “The Rebirth of Education,” which analyzes the challenges the developing world faces to ensure improvements in literacy and numeracy. 

The United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) has described it as the Global Learning Crisis.

In Vedic India, a teacher used to occupy the highest position in the society. They are the guru and they have position that is even higher than that of a king. But there are reports that suggest that a very high number of teachers, especially in rural India, are not playing their ideal role. With the changing scenario, where contemporary education is giving way to digital system, it’s high time that our teachers understand its importance and equip themselves with latest system and methods for imparting education.

What we want today are teachers who have moved on from the basic image of being strict to having a close bond with their students.

Teaching as a profession is probably the most challenging because it combines all the other professions in order to help a child grow. One has to have good communication skills, managerial skills, reading and writing skills, storytelling skills, everything.

Information and communication technology (ICT) offers a diverse set of technological tool for teachers worldwide.

The quality of education in government schools in India, which more than 80% of children attend, is a cause for concern. At the same time, the gap between these schools and elite private schools is widening. It is critical that all children acquire required capabilities from education to help them play a rightful role in the emerging knowledge society.

Information & Communication Technologies (ICTs), which are playing a key role in creating this knowledge society, can also support the quality of school education by helping children and teachers to access and use digital learning resources, create local curricular resources and connect to one another for peer learning and networking.

The real challenge in integrating ICTs into education is pedagogical, which means the teacher needs to be the focus of support. Integrating ICTs with mainstream teaching-learning can lead to engagement and ownership of teachers, necessary for supporting learning.

Technology can play a very important part in India’s quest for quality education. The problem of shortage of teachers in remote locations could be reduced by introducing AI-enabled robotic teaching assistants connected over the Cloud who would help standardise teaching curriculums and impart knowledge to students.

The potential benefits of emerging technologies for the education sector include personalized coaching, improved relevance of course coverage by continually updating academic literature to encompass the latest developments, and improved liaison of academic institutes with industry professionals for imparting ‘job focused’ skill sets. 

Government can also look at a public-private partnership models to improve teachers training, vocational and employability skills in India by funding innovative organizations.  

For example, there are several applications which are contributing towards building a national teachers platform and have leveraged on individual pedagogical experts and organisations with exemplar content to create digital courses in Math, Language, Pedagogy and Science for teachers which are available as short interactive offline videos to use anytime, anywhere.

What does it take to be a teacher and so how can someone be “prepared” to become a teacher? This question continues to be one of the most important in school education.

Till we build a new teacher education system, our schools will not improve; most other things that we do are like trying to desperately contain the symptoms, while ignoring the life threatening infection, as it rages on.