“Grandmum,” I exclaimed, “look how good I wrote my name!”
“How well you wrote your name,” my grandmother corrected me with a smile as she took the piece of paper with “ANNA” written on in it purple Crayola marker.
“Yeah, yeah, that’s what I meant,” I replied, returning to my coloring.
Even at 4 years old, I knew better than to use such improper grammar. My grandmother was a teacher, an English teacher to be precise, and she would simply not allow her grandchildren, no matter how small they were, to speak with anything less than an exemplary command of the English language. (By the time my younger sister was 4, I would be the one doing the correcting).
My other grandmother had also been a teacher. The woman who looked after me while my parents were at work was a teacher. And as if that was not enough, my own mother taught fifth grade at the school where my cousins would later attend. Some of my most poignant childhood memories are of sitting in one of their classrooms, amongst students who were much older than me, playing with whiteboard markers or looking through the hundreds of books while a math lesson took place in my periphery.
No one ever had to tell me that teachers worked evenings, weekends and summers or that they cared for their students as much as their own children. No one had to tell me teachers never got the thanks they deserved. No one had to tell me such things because I witnessed them all first hand.
In the United States, most teachers do not receive the proper respect or recognition, but most Americans will acknowledge teaching to be at least somewhat of a "noble" profession. In Bhutan, this is not the case.
The majority of Bhutanese society looks down upon their teachers. These men and women are not seen as the molders of the next generation’s minds, but rather as those people who did not score high enough in their examinations to earn a government scholarship to study for a more "impressive" degree in India or elsewhere.
This is not terribly surprising when you realize that in Bhutan, even 7-year-olds have to take end-of-the-year exams to determine whether or not they can move on past their current class. Modern education, in the way we in the west think of it, did not begin in earnest in Bhutan until the mid 20th century. Today’s Bhutanese young people will be the first generation to be exposed to near-universal education. Prior to the development of modern education in the 1950s and 1960s, the only formal education in Bhutan existed almost exclusively within the monastic body. Monastic education focuses on rote memorization and the carefully organized progression from one stage of learning to the next. The legacy of this way of teaching and study is still present in Bhutan’s modern educational institutions.
Within schools, there is still a large emphasis placed on memorization and repetition, and passing examinations are for the most part the be-all-end-all. Students are not constantly encouraged to “problem-solve" or to “critically analyze,” or even to “think creatively!” in even close to the same way we in the United States are. Where does this leave Bhutan’s teachers?
In no way will I try to argue that teachers in Bhutan do not care about their students as much as their American counterparts because that claim is simply not true. However, in a society where education is treated not as a journey or exploration, but rather as a means to an end, teaching carries a different connotation. If students are not expected to think critically and creatively, it is in turn hard to expect as much from teachers. Educators in Bhutan have textbooks to follow and exams to prep their students for.
No matter how brilliant a person is, if he or she has not learned how to teach, this person will not be a successful teacher. This is the current problem in Bhutan. As a whole, the nation wants its students to be prepared for the modern, global world, but the current educational system does not support this.
As is often the case, the blames falls on teachers, who in Bhutan, are ill equipped, both in professional development and curriculum, to aid their students in becoming people ready to take on the global world. Instead of investing all efforts in educational infrastructure, the creation of more schools and teacher training, Bhutan continues to spend huge amounts on scholarships to send its students to study abroad.
Education in Bhutan is undoubtedly significantly better off than it was even 10 years ago. However, there is still a long way to go. The sooner Bhutan realizes what I knew when I was 4 years old, that teachers are the real shapers of education—and in turn a nation’s future—the country will be able to develop its educational system to a new height.
