The Hindu Business Line : <I>Needed: Practitioner teachers in ICT </I>

The emerging shortage of trained people in the information and communication technology (ICT) field is alarming. The Government is talking of opening 30 new institutes to train young people in this discipline over the next three to five years. Is this likely to be achieved? It is a moot point whether the government is capable of even developing just the brick and mortar infrastructure and the equipment needed for such an investment, reportedly around Rs 3,000 crore. It is typical of our country that we wake up to a need such as this one fine day and make grand plans to solve everything with one decision.

Performance against promises

Announcements are often treated by officialdom as almost equivalent to action. With neither the media nor the public inclined to follow up and periodically examine the actual performance against promises, it is doubtful whether a major change in the educational structure of the country of this nature will come about anytime soon. There is talk of seeking collaboration in this with industry. Eventually, as in everything else, the bigger industrial firms will have to bear the brunt of the cost. And there are many hidden costs, such as of inducting and training half-baked professionals, who have come through with less than satisfactory levels of proficiency from institutions of unreliable quality. Then, they have to be put through their paces, correcting mistakes and learning on the job at company expense.

HR professionals are already at their wits' ends to keep up with the rate of turnover of staff and coping with the huge volume of recruitment effort. Despite the automation and outsourcing, they will be further hard-pressed with the load of sifting through an increasing pool of graduates. Finally, the quality control responsibility rests with the internal manager, not with the agency however capable it may be.

Quality of teaching

On top of technological complexities, there is the eternal issue of quality of teaching. The teacher's competence and enthusiasm is everything. In a world of technical standardisation where processes, lessons and even examinations can all be programmed into a disc, technically, the overall standard of education ought to rise rapidly, but this is never so, because of the greater dependence of our students on face-to-face teaching. Sadly, very few schools even care about inculcating the art of learning for oneself in the student, by asking searching questions and seeking answers through an independent search of libraries.

Ills of education

Even in MBA courses, on-line study assignments deteriorate into plagiarism and cut-and-paste jobs from the Internet, with hardly any real assimilation of the learning. This leaves one with a bunch of poor quality of untrained minds with lazy study habits — just waiting to be spoon-fed. Even if one does accept some degree of such dependence initially, the sort of teachers who will go beyond merely spouting what is in the text book are rare and few. And they are poorly paid and discouraged by a government style system of management and pay. All the ills of Indian education, starting from the primary school level, which have been reiterated by committee after committee, will surface once again in the case of the IT industry-oriented training.

There is, thus, no alternative to the successful practitioner turning teacher. That alone holds some promise of raising the standards of education beyond simply learning by rote. The fate of the future generation of professionals is in the hands of leaders of the user-industries. And they must not fail to grasp it.

S. Ramachander

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