There are quite a number of English medium schools in the nation's capital which have strictly made it a rule for their teachers not to coach their students after school hours.
The decision is certainly welcome and is a pointer to the fact that the authorities of these schools --- Maple Leaf, Sunbeams, Sunnydale, Oxford and a few others --- are serious about ensuring quality teaching within the classroom and at the same time are careful about preventing teachers from engaging in their own money-spinning schemes at the expense of the schools they teach in.
But the same cannot be said of a good number of otherwise perfectly reputed schools, where inadequate or laidback teaching has created circumstances where parents not only have to cough up a good deal of money as school fees for their children but also be sure they have extra cash to pay the teachers who coach their children in a variety of subjects in the afternoon or evening at the ubiquitous coaching centers dotting the landscape in Lalmatia and Dhanmondi.
The issue here is certainly not that inadequate classroom teaching compels these young people to go for extra lessons at the coaching centers, though all that additional payment of fees is a perennial headache for guardians. The bigger and more pernicious issue is the fact that these coaching centers are manned by some of the very teachers who do not seem to be paying the kind of attention their pupils need in the school classroom.
There is a serious ethical issue involved here. And there are all the many dimensions of ethics which come into this kind of discussion.
When teachers in reputed English medium schools are paid rather well and are expected to bring to their classroom the degree of dedication and expertise which in earlier times lent dignity to the teaching profession in this country, it is inconceivable that these teachers somehow fail to meet the requirements despite the clear skills and abilities they possess in teaching the young.
When a teacher explains just one problem in arithmetic in class but has no hesitation about explaining a whole series or a whole exercise to those same students when they turn up at his coaching centre, eyebrows are certainly raised. Those exercises, or for that matter exercises in any other subject --- English, the sciences, et cetera --- ought to have been handled in the classroom. That is why the teachers are there.
The reputation of a school depends on the intellectual caliber and classroom skills of its teachers. It goes up when teachers uphold the integrity of their profession, through leaving their students convinced that they have been enlightened, in the classroom, on the subjects they study.
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