It might look impersonal looking at the revered teaching profession this way. Sentiments apart, the teachers of today, primarily at the higher education levels aim at bridging gaps that exist between the students’ level of knowledge and theirs. But what happens when the educator’s level itself becomes inadequate?

Special Status

Currently, our syllabus for various courses assumes mostly a very static perspective. Yet unfortunately for these curriculum planners, in all the hottest topics of today, be it information technology, digital electronics or management concepts, changes are taking place at a breath-taking pace.

What then gives the teacher of today such a special status in our education system? The first is the sheer duration a lecturer or professor has spent on his/her topic of specialization. Age brings with it years of familiarity with the topic especially where the course structures are static or changing at a slow pace. Iterative teaching over the years on a course that basically remains the same gives the teacher of today a rich understanding of the limited portion he/she has to cover.

The second aspect is that of the virtuous cycle of knowledge. As knowledge begets knowledge, climbing further steps on the knowledge ladder might be easier for an expert than a beginner even though he/she may be an eager student. This is because of the sheer fact that the leaps in learning a teacher takes will typically be of a smaller increment compared to those taken by a novice student.

Again the assumption here is that teachers of today take pains to update the requisite skills for teaching their topic.

The new middleman

Let’s look at the current scenario. Teachers are having human limitations of memory capacity as well as time to find out, read and absorb voluminous information that keeps accumulating every day. The students of today know that they need to compete not just with their peers in the class, but perhaps the world at large for the most coveted of jobs. Confronted with the various limitations suffered by the faculty, its little wonder that disillusionment sets in amongst students in their quest for cutting edge knowledge.

The powerful combination of the Personal Computer as a tool with the World Wide Web as the playing field enters now. With a click here and a search there, today’s student can seek out information from virtually unlimited sources. But the web in its form today suffers from the twin drawbacks of lack of interactiveness in the true sense of the term coupled with major communication bottlenecks.

The Road Ahead

In the book "The Road Ahead", Bill Gates talks at length about the inevitability of changing our archaic and outdated educational systems. Along with this, he has also argued (with a lot of conviction) about teachers and instructors being able to retain their jobs even in a computer-dominant world. According to Gates, this is because the net will act more as a tool rather than as a replacement to teachers per se.

Today, whenever an educational institution plans to computerize on a big scale, there is resistance from several quarters. This has been largely from the techno-phobes amongst the academics as well as the computer illiterates amongst the decision making authority like director boards.

Perhaps an argument as the one Gates puts forward might melt the resistance to computerization (and to the Internet) from the various arms of the academic world due to budgetary constraints or otherwise. However, this does not tackle the sheer redundancy of having an instructor when the net by itself becomes highly interactive as well intuitive.

Death of the Information Postmen

Today, we require lecturers, professors and so on to explain and elucidate information that vexes the student. The teacher's value addition lies in imparting complex knowledge in a simple manner. The moment that disappears, the teacher becomes nothing more than an "information postman". In fact, even in the current print era, we have a lot of such teachers (or postmen, if you may) who read out from prescribed textbooks without a single original contribution in content or in methodology to make the student's understanding process quicker.

The value addition provided by today’s teacher will dwindle as more and more activities get performed with the help of the Personal Computer. Under such circumstances, the teachers of tomorrow will have to do a thorough rethinking as to what their role should be.

Academicians for the millennium

In the future, we would not require teachers who will act as web-browsers and link-finders as students will very well do these jobs themselves. The experience obtained primarily thorough biological age will amount to nothing as a person's competence will lie in absorbing and comprehending vast amounts of information within his domain of specialization in the quickest way possible. Sadly for the teachers in the older mould, this would mean confronting fresh chunks of information every moment in the career.

Thus the survival of the teacher of tomorrow will depend on (i) sheer ability to keep his/her foot on the ground when challenged with surging currents of cluttered data and (ii) ability to sieve, assimilate and explain newest among the new information quickly. The knowledge gap between the teacher and the pupil is an occupational necessity. If it vanishes, it will bring to question the raison d'être of the teacher.

Then again, today (and maybe even tomorrow), there are a lot of people who understand things better by listening to talks and lectures rather than going through the printed word or the monitor screen. Probably, in that sense, only a "human teacher" and not a cold, unsentimental monitor screen, can provide the personal touch of a guide and be a truly interactive instructor.