Why can't a school teacher make Rs 60k to Rs 70k per month??

Don't worry, I am not introducing some form of scam here. I just want to ask some provocative questions. What is the difference b/w education in the 21st Century India and 19th century India? Nothing much has changed... has it? During those days you had to hail the queen of England... Today we know we are kind of independent. Some elite schools also have LCD projectors these days instead of chalk boards... We have tutions and Xerox notes. But the teacher mostly performs an identical job. Today a teacher would show you a some stuff from encyclopedia Britannica on the Projector and read out what is written there for the kids. Nothing much has changed in the centuries. During the Good ol' days, there were a few teachers who would inspire you in spite of the system. Today, you have fewer teachers who inspire you in spite of the system.

If anything has changed, it is that teaching has become a much less favorable job due to low salaries. Merely switching to BPO or IT can multiply your salary anywhere between 2 to 10 times. Even if you have a passion to teach, the smartest way out is to become a corporate trainer. How will the next generation get a meaningful education when nobody wants to teach?? As the years pass, the problem will become even more acute as the previous generation teachers retire. My friend Achyuta says how much he loves to teach primary school as these kids have endured the least amount of brain damage. But he also says that it is impossible to manage your finances with the miniscule salaries you get as a school teacher. I hope and prey that he never moves out. But hey everyone deserves a good quality of life.

Is there no money in education? One of my colleagues who is a manager who moved to Bangalore for a single year, had to cough up Rs.20,000 to get his kid admitted to some anonymous nursery school in his area. What can they teach for 20,000 in one year in nursery?? Where is all this money going? It just gets siphoned out of the field of education. It does not reach the teacher. Even a teacher himself/herself needs to cough up insane sums of money to get their own kids educated. What an irony. And in a flash all this money moves out of education. God knows where it lands up!!! Real estate? Stock market? Pubs? Your guess is as good as mine...Wherever the money lands up, it makes life even more expensive for the teacher...

Do these school managements really provide such an irreplaceable service? What are they providing? Real estate? Furniture? Library? Labs? Teacher recruitment and time management? Keeping the Boards happy? Payroll? They do provide all these and more... But still I can't spot a single thing they do that seems so spectacular, that they need to keep such a huge slice of the pie. Compare it with Hospitals v/s Doctors for Example.

Why do we need so many middle men? It is the teachers who teach just like it is the doctors who cure. The rest of it is just grunt work some one needs to do and is best handled through consolidation and economies of scale. One has to realize that management is just another service.

A good teacher at least deserves a pay greater than a lousy programmer gets in IT. At least he or she is making some positive contribution to society. The lousy programmer just adds more bugs than he has fixed... and takes time and resources to do that. And he will refuse to do even that unless he gets an on-site opportunity. I am not speaking of the top 10% of the cream of IT. I guess they do provide value.

But the rest just make IT even harder to manage... Most projects I have seen look like 10 people trying to sweep a room at once. A lot of dust moves around in circles. But very little dust leaves the room. And everyone is tired at the end of the day. Sooo many people are not really needed to keep the IT infrastructure running.

Another problem with teaching is that it wastes the time of the teacher in an infinite number of funny ways. How many surgeons dress the wounds of their patients or give them pills at regular intervals, measure their temperature and BP and so on? In a school, the next lower person below the teacher is the ayah who is usually not even literate. So even the dumbest jobs need to be done by the teacher if she can't outsource it to the students. She needs to spell-check each class work and homework. Give the home works and punish the defaulters, take attendance, conduct dictations, tests, recitations, evaluate the results, tabulate them, dictate notes and confirm whether all students are upto date... the unending list just goes on.

Doing all this needs nothing more than a 10th grade education. But there is no nurse. So the neuro surgeon needs to do even the job of the barber to keep the show going. Imagine if a real teacher could really reach out to 600 students at once instead of 60 and she could be engaged in “pure teaching”... Her salary would multiply by 10X and job satisfaction would multiply by 100X too. You would only have 1/10th the need for such teachers. Hey, this would be an entirely different breed of teachers. Don't start imagining a cinema theater full of students and a class teacher standing in front. I mean something very different. For a moment ignore implementation... just question the math about the amount of “real teaching” v/s “pointless rituals” that happens in a classroom per day. 25% of the job of the teacher is to be the “Gurkah” of the classroom. i.e maintain law and order.

You must have started wondering... but hey, that can't be possible!!! How can you introduce the equivalent of the nurse into the classroom?? I want to hear your fiercest objections to questions I ask and then I will proceed towards possible solutions. Remember, we live in a world of infinite technological possibilities we did not have at our disposal a couple of centuries ago. We are not using them the right way... that is all. Let us get creative about technology deployment in the classroom. Right now I don't want you to think of solutions. But am I not asking the right question? Once you start asking the right questions your problem is already half solved.

Can you imagine, the profit margins on the so called “Organic Farming”. Would anyone have believed that you could sell "Mineral Water" in a country like India, twenty years ago?? Is it impossible to really sell “Quality Education” to at least the growing Indian middle and upper middle class? Is it impossible to pay a teacher, proportionate to the value he/she brings to society. Does the neuro surgeon really need to do the job of the barber also??