The teachers we are losing — and the ones we still need

FUNERALS have a way of stripping public language of its pretence.

- PROFESSOR DHIRU SONI

In the eulogy for a departed teacher, the usual phrases of condolence gave way to something more revealing: testimony.

A fellow colleague did not speak merely of a woman who taught lessons, marked books and kept registers. He spoke of someone who counselled children, visited homes, defended the vulnerable and treated education as a moral vocation rather than a timetable. In death, she was remembered not only as a teacher, but as an institution — a legend.

That memory invites a harder question than nostalgia usually allows: what, exactly, has changed in the epistemology of teaching? In other words, what counts as knowledge in the classroom now, and what sort of human being is the teacher expected to be in relation to that knowledge?

Teachers of the past, at their best, did not understand education as the narrow transfer of examinable content. They saw knowledge as inseparable from character, judgement, citizenship and social longing. The child was not a future unit of labour alone, but a person in formation. Teaching therefore exceeded the syllabus. It included moral example, psychological attentiveness, pastoral care, public service and the patient work of building confidence in children whose homes, histories or hardships had taught them to expect very little from the world.

This older model was not perfect. It could be paternalistic. It sometimes depended too heavily on personal sacrifice, especially by women, and too little on just institutional support.

Some schools romanticised authority. Yet, for all its flaws, the best of that tradition understood a truth contemporary systems often forget: education is not only about making a living; it is about learning how to live.

That is why so many teachers from earlier generations became urban legends.