IDEALS OF A TEACHER’S LIFE.
Mrs. Sarojini Naidu delivered a lecture on the above subject at the Teachers’ College, Saidapet, on 20th December, 1917:—
Friends,—It is rather a presumption for an outsider to come and talk to you about the ideals of a teacher’s life and of greater cooperation and understanding between men and women in the profession of teaching. I can only deal with that subject, not from a practical but from an idealistic point of view, because as I tell you, I have no experience practically of educational matters nor the difficulties of a teacher’s vocation; but like everyone else, I have my own ideals of what a teacher’s vocation means and should mean. Especially in this great land of India where, above all things, honour and wealth, the teacher, the guru was a man at whose feet kings lay down their obeisance. I do not know of any country in the world where the vocation of the teacher was touched with a sacrosanct quality. But, in giving something of sanctity, India truly realised the almost divine qualities that are necessary in one who presumes to call himself a teacher of men. A teacher of men, perhaps, sounds a phrase too big and yet what is the teacher of the child excepting the teacher and the maker of the man that is to be ? And more than any politician, more than any soldier, more than any other man who helps to build up a country’s progress, it is the teacher who comes first. He deserves the greatest honour because to him is entrusted the preliminary responsibility of building up a character and spirit that go towards impressing themselves upon the life of the tomorrow, that a child is going to build. Therefore, it is very necessary that we today, who have fallen away from all our ideals should return to them and to no ideal so definitely and so solemnly as the ideals of the guru and the place of the guru in the national life.
All responsibility is a privilege; but responsibility is a burden and a heavy burden. To-day, I will speak to you of the quality and nature of this burden and responsibility. Some people say and rightly say, and I do not deny the challenge, that I am always going bac to the past for my ideals. In that very accusation I find an unconscious tribute to the living qualities of those immortal ideals and the historic continuity of the Indian thought that can take us back to a past that never dies for a living inspiration for the future. And among other ideals, the ideal of education in the past in its own way provides the type not of education but of the personal relation of the teacher with the pupil, of the guru with the disciple. In modern education, especially in India, we have lost sight of that central fact that it is not what the teacher teaches out of the textbooks, the facts in history, the boundaries and the rivers and the mountains in geography, but what unconsciously he gives — his personality to the pupil that matters vitally in the quality of the education that the pupil receives.
This personal element in education has entirely been lost sight of in the modern systems of education. Everywhere in my travels in India, I make it a special point to go and study the educational institutions and especially to come in contact with those to whom is entrusted the supreme privilege of teaching the youth, and I find how little the teacher is honoured and how little the teacher honours himself. It is not the honour that comes from men, but it is that self-reverence of that great vocation of the teacher’s feeling within him, something of that prophetic reverence which says, “These souls are mine to make and to mould and to give to the country.” That is an enthusiasm that I have not found excepting here and there when education has been chosen as a vocation because education chose the votaries that were predestined for the cause. But everyone is not predestined. We have, in the struggle for life, in choosing our profession, to count a means of livelihood and coming down to the most practical ideals of educational vocation, we choose it as one of the professions that will supply bread for our families. But, there is no vocation that need be mechanical, there is no vocation so low that it cannot be ennobled by the noble spirit of one that follows it. And when one chooses the high and responsible vocation of a teacher, how much more should the ennobling process go on, because the vocation itself is noble and that it ennobles those that follow it earnestly, patiently and faithfully?
We are told that education has produced in India – I say too, I feel it, I am a product of that education – not a vital culture but only knowledge. We all know that in studying history that certain battles were fought in certain years, invaders came from certain parts and conquered certain provinces. We know too that this dynasty was succeeded by that dynasty and so on. But take the teaching of history for instance, that history which is the geography of nations. How is history taught? Is it taught as a living background to contemporary things as a clue to contemporary evolution; is it taught as a living factor in the life of the world, or, is it taught that in the year 1066 William the Conqueror fought the battle of Hastings? But the way I was taught never made me understand what came in the way of William the Conqueror, what became of the enormous culture and traditions into England, what followed in the wake of that conquest, how England became Normanised and was extended in the sphere of intellectual and spiritual evolution. Coming nearer home, we Indians, with our own history, how do we teach it so that our sons talk about the battle of Panipat?
The great living background, that great cosmos of history is a dead thing to them, a thing printed on the page between the covers of a text-book. He is not taught anything that can stir his spirit and say to him, “what meant the great historic past meant the great historic future.” Take again, geography. What is it? Is it merely that India is bounded by the Himalayas in the north and by the submarines in the south? What are we taught of that living unity between province and province, of that country that is bounded by the Himalayas in the north and by the submarines in the south? Nothing. What is taught of the great rivers that have watched the pilgrims go from north to south and from south to north? What have we learnt of the great centres as are represented by cities, not merely capitals of political powers, but centres of the spiritual thought? When our children hear of Rameswaram, what is it more than a town on the sea-coast? Do they know of the temples there, the centre of a great Dravidian culture? Of Lucknow in the United Provinces, what more do we know of it than the Mutiny—and the Residency of a bombarded garrison? Do they know that Lucknow was the capital of a Madyadesa of that ancient India where our civilisation flourished?
History and geography separated can never become vital things and today the study of geography has been revolutionised that those who learnt geography 20 years ago would think it was something new because now it is not taught that cities are dead things. They are taught as links between race and race. Frontiers are the living means of communication or defence between foes and friends. That is the way of teaching geography.
Then again we come to the teaching of political economy. Political Economy is a science, but I can understand that it is one of the things that most vitally matters in the contemporary reading of a country’s condition, of her past and possibilities for the future. When we teach political economy as a matter of academic thing, of what use is it to Indian students unless we can assimilate it to life later on, because of all the sciences of the world political economy should be the most living and go with us into our life so that we may keep the right perspective of material things and bear it as the right perspective of spiritual things because these two things are intertwined. One has, therefore, to teach the subject as a real living thing. But this central fact we forget that education has to be manifold, many-sided, not merely technical or literary or scientific or artistic; but education thoroughly understood, properly realised, means cooperation of every type of teacher for the building up of a manifold culture in the mind of the child. We are getting one-sided. Our education makes students not scholars, imperfect students not mellowed scholars. For scholarship implies a living life of culture, and culture is a thing widely separated from knowledge. The Italians who have a language that is so capable of expressing the many shades of thought and reality have two separate words instruction and education. Instruction is a thing that we get in the Indian schools and colleges. Education is a thing that we got in the past and that we do not receive in the present. The vital difference lies here that the Indian teacher himself, the outcome of machinemade systems, becomes a machine. (Cheers.)
There is nothing to cheer. It is something to weep. He is a machine; he can turn out so many hours a day, paid at such and such a rate, and can drill so many facts into the head of the child. The child passes through the examination mill and gets a certificate. He knows certain dates unrelated to anything else. He knows the names of certain rivers. That is all he knows. He has instruction, has knowledge. His mind is a storeroom overcrowded with things that are absolutely of no use to him. For, of what use is unrelated knowledge, of what use are isolated facts. When the great crisis of life comes to you how does it help you? But education is this.
When knowing that a certain battle was fought in a certain year, the man in the crisis of life remembers how a certain man won or lost, can look in the face of danger, that is the culture, that is the date become life, that is instruction become culture, because culture is a thing that is the spirit of instruction, that which impresses into a man’s life to enrich him, to help him in every moment of his life. That is culture, that is a thing that one in a thousand gets in India when he gets his diploma. So, I think that one of the first things that we, as teachers, have to realise is the revitalising of our own spirit, the rekindling of our own torches of our intellect and the spirit. Until you can do that how can you hope to light the little rows of unlighted lamps; for by the flickering light you cannot light the lamps. It is this flame within you that I want to re-kindle.
We as Hindus can have no better symbol for our spirit than the flame that is the type of our home, that is the type of our spiritual altars, that has been the type of our life, the type of our death. The hearth fire, the funeral fire always is the flame with a true symbol of the Hindu spirit because the flame is that one thing that purifies, kindles, gives life, cleanses. We want the flame to be re-kindled. We have ashes, we have the embers dying. The spirit is dying within the heart of the Indian teacher. It is not dead. It is to be re-kindled bringing illumination into the heart of India. The teacher’s vocation is this, that though he himself sits in his chair, he is serving the country in manifold ways. He is the statesman and he is the poet: he is the scientist and he is the merchant, because as Stevenson says in a song of his: “The sword maker sits by his forge but he goes wherever his sword goes and travels.” He who makes the sword fights the battles. And the one man, the one teacher is the manifold patriot because he gives to the country the soldier, the statesman, the scholar, the trader, the lawyer, and those who are required in the complex building up of a national life.
The old ideals of teaching lay in this that the Guru gave up, renounced willingly Lakshmi for Saraswathi in literature so that he came to the verge of poverty. But the spirit of it was that not for wealth, not for material gain, but that, freed from the burden of material greed, his spirit might be free to soar itself and bring from the heaven of wisdom some message of hope for the disciples around him. That was the ideal of the teacher in the olden days. I know teachers still who keep that great ideal, who look on themselves as prophets of old looked on themselves, dedicated, consecrated their lives, were the symbols of their instruction not merely in speech but their lives had to be the embodiment of wisdom they taught.
One such Guru I know who, having within his grasp all that material wealth could give, all that rank could give and success could give, said, “No, I come of a race of those who taught spiritual wisdom, whose doors were opened to poor and rich alike and I, son of a Brahmin race whose duty it is to give wisdom, give knowledge, I do not want wealth and power. I want to sit somewhere so that the multitude of truthful hearers might hear.” And that man was my father. If I have no personal qualification to speak on the ideal of a Guru, at least I have before me the living memory of a man who for two generations not merely taught knowledge but gave wisdom, and wisdom of that kind that from far and near, rich and poor, men and women, princes and beggars, came to hear what he had to say. That was the true democracy of a Guru that makes no ranks in the giving of wisdom, in the teaching of ideals. The man who had come on the elephant had to sit beside the man whose feet were stained with dust. And that was one of the greatest lessons, practical lessons, unspoken but emphatically achieved, that lesson of the real brotherhood between man and man when the soul of man comes to learn wisdom. That is one of the great ideals that you teachers have to carry out in your schools and life. There is no difference between any class that comes to you, between any community that comes to you; your duty is to be impersonal in the giving but personal in the gift. It seems like a paradox.
It means this, that if to a hundred who come to learn, each has the equal right on your attention and mind, to each give equally impersonally the best that is in you to give and personal and intimate should be the gift because it should come out of the depths of your conviction and knowledge. It is the giving of your self not the giving of your knowledge that matters; for, remember that for every hour that you spend in the schoolroom the child is unconsciously moulding the impress of its character from you. Your finger is marked on the potter’s clay. There your impression is carried through life. The other day, Mr. Hydari, who has been elected President of the Muhammadan Educational Conference, was discussing with me some items of the Presidential speech and one of the things that struck me very much was the ideal of a Guru, a teacher. He spoke of a great Englishman, Professor Wordsworth of Elphinstone College, Bombay, whose memory will never die in the Bombay Presidency. Here was an Englishman, not an Indian, but he was a born Guru. He knows no difference of race or creed. Because Wordsworth was in Elphinstone College, it was possible for Telang and Gokhale and Ranade to be great Indian patriots.
I want you to understand that a Guru is of no race; his is a spiritual kingdom, not the kingdom of race or civilisation. Now, Professor Wordsworth had in him the true spirit of a teacher and, therefore, he understood that if a son of any Indian has come into your hand you do not want to make a bastard Englishman but a true Indian of him. But what he revealed of the Indian spirit to the Indian youth that produced the Gokhale and Telang and Ranade, that is one of the great practical illustrations of the personal, intimate gift of character to the child. It was because Professor Wordsworth had that great mission, that great impartial vision of right and the national reticence that he was able to give the virile qualities of the English race to the Indian spirit and produce not merely Indians who had learnt English as instruction but who had absorbed the spirit of the English greatness into enriching the ancient spirit and civilisation. Now, you may have the Muhammadan children to teach or the Muhammadan teacher may have a hundred Hindu pupils. It never means that a Hindu becomes a bad Hindu when he is taught by a Mussalman. Not at all. Each is confirmed in his own faith because faith is a thing, no matter what the doctrine, that can only be strengthened by a man of character, a person very fine, no matter to what race or creed he belongs.
You in Southern India do not come across with cosmopolitan element. You come across with sects and castes. And now I know I touch upon a very delicate point. It is very controversial and bitterly emphasised, unnecessarily and wrongly emphasised. What was the sect and caste in the old days? Not for division but meant for the final unity of service by division of labour. We have lost sight of this fact. We feel that we want separate schools for Brahmins, Non-Brahmins, Panchamas, etc. But there is the fundamental problem, the Hindu-Muslim problem, because a race of teachers has risen that understand, no matter whether Hindu or Muhammadan, the teacher’s duty is to teach life. Here again, what matters if a Brahmin sits side by side with a man who has not got that chance of evolution? What does it matter to you? Your duty is clear. Your duty is to kindle, to hold the flame, to light the blaze. That is where your responsibility comes in, so that understanding your own duty, your own responsibility, you begin to feel within yourself that fervour that comes of the knowledge that the mission is yours which only you can fulfil. Who is there that can replace you in the national life? Who is there that can ever mar, if not, repair your bad work in later life.
You are laying the foundation on which others raise walls and it is those that lay the foundations that are the true artists who are never recognised. Who cares when praise is accorded, when the design is praised and the architect is congratulated and a great man comes to perform the opening ceremony and says how beautiful are the decorations on the wall. No one remembers where are the men that laid the foundation. But laying of foundation is a privilege great enough to bring its own immortality. But why need the recognition loudly expressed by men! Is it not enough to know that to you is given the first duty of building up this human edifice ? The child comes to you eager with no memory behind it. Something on which you write, the memory it will recall in later life. If you have given to the child the gift of hope out of your own conviction of hope, nothing in later life will make that child despair but if you have out of your own pessimism, of your own despair and your own narrow vision or your own narrow sympathies constricted that child’s expansion, all that child’s life will be directed to wrong that no later influence will wholly repair. So I want you to remember the solemnity of your profession, the real vital quality of your profession and you must feel that you are the nation-builders. The mother first, the Guru afterwards, and then the chance of the changes of life. But you give the direction, you mould, you carve and uphold and conserve, or you destroy. How many young spirits are not known to have been ruined hopelessly, ruined consciously, and it can all be traced back to the lack of sympathy in the teacher when the child went to school with his eager dream. It was the spirit and the rebuff was not in so many words that has been the bane of many a youth who in later life, seeing a greater vision, has not been able to follow it because the habit of being rebuffed became second nature to him that at every step he became impatient. Have we not in our own time faced that ? Have we not felt that the worst anguish of our lives has not been so much the bane on the real things later on as the rebuff that we received from our teachers ?
I want to emphasize another point. We in India have lost the tradition of beauty and that was one of the greatest traditions, because if beauty, the love of beauty, the supreme necessity for beauty were not considered and acknowledged an agent of the spiritual life, why was it that our great temples and monasteries were built, where nature spoke in epic tongues of the unseen beauty, of the great faith, because beauty always reconciles you to the unseen, always brings that exaltation of the spirit; beauty has that glamour and it helps us. That is the power, the alchemic power of beauty. It makes it possible for the young vision to perform that miracle which in the words of an Irish poet is able to transmute clay into gold, weariness into ecstasy.
It is really a Hindu saying though it came from a Celt. And that only comes when one has this love of beauty. When I say beauty I do not mean it in any material sense, but beauty that has the spirit of life, that responds to all the influences of nature, the influences of concrete beauty, such as we find in art, music. These things are left out of the curricula of the Indian teacher’s mind. Beauty must be the background of his instruction and it must be the goal of his teaching, for beauty means harmony, the harmonising of knowledge and the conflicting elements in life, the harmonising of joy with sorrow, the harmonising of weakness with strength, the harmonising of failure with victory. That is the meaning of beauty and we have lost it in modern life. We have lost the true clue that enabled our saints and mystics to make penance. Theirs was the religion of ecstacy; ecstacy because they loved beauty and understood beauty and they sought for beauty. It was the religion of beauty that was the religion of renunciation of old days. If you are true to your own traditions, go back and say even as the Guru said to his disciples, “I too in myself would embody their ideals.” It is in yourself to say “I shall be a living academy in myself; I shall be the centre of life and every young soul that has passed through my hands will be my living means of communication to bear to the world the ideals within me.” That is the ideal of the Indian teacher because it is the ideal of ancient India and it is the only ideal that will transmute mere instruction into culture and change mere facts into life.
Now we come to another point which is not quite novel, not quite unprecedented as some of us might imagine. In our modern life we find that women are not sharing with men of India the duty and privilege of being the layers of foundation.
Why is it that this erroneous idea has come in that it is quite a new thing in the West that women may be teachers. Long before any definite, conscious system of education was evolved and labelled vocation for teachers, it was understood at the beginning of time that the first teachers of the world were women. They are still women, the most illiterate women. In India the first teacher of the child is the woman. So in her home the most illiterate peasant woman is entrusted with teaching the first lessons of life to her child. Is it not logical that the educated Indian woman should expand the sphere of her right to teach by coming out and sharing with you in ennobling comradeship this privilege of giving citizens to India? For the Indian teachers this is the most fruitful lesson to learn, the lesson of true cooperation with the sisters who have come to stand beside you as comrades. The whole of our old civilisation was based on the equal responsibility in the spiritual life of the women so that you today cannot perform your sacrifices unless the woman stands by your side. What is it that it is a symbol of? If a woman stands beside your sacrifices according to your religious teaching, if in your home she stands beside you, sharing with you the joys and sorrows, comforting you, rejoicing with you in the hour of victory, who are you that you should exclude her in this function, this divine privilege? For, no man lives for himself and no woman lives unto herself and no nation can be single-handed. You want the two hands of a nation to uplift itself and together we shall carry the soul of India to the heights of her eternal glory.