Education is a fundamental right of each human being. In the constitution of the Republic of India it was envisaged that the State would provide within years from its commencement free and compulsory education to all children up to the age of years. Recently by an act of constitutional amendment the Parliament has made universal elementary education compulsory. Many countries of the world have gone a step beyond and made ten years of general education compulsory. In our country there are million children in the school age group.
The challenge now is to provide educational access for universal elementary education to million children and to follow it by universal secondary education. Even achieving universal primary education has been an uphill task as because of budgetary
constraints the State has not been able to invest in this sector at the desired level and education as an effective instrument for national development could not be fully realities. For setting up a school funds are needed for putting in place the required physical and instructional infrastructure that make a school a school. Physical infrastructure comprises a school building suitable for holding instructional activities classrooms and playground, and instructional infrastructure comprises learning resources textbooks teaching aids and most crucial of all professionally competent teachers.
If for making a rule of thumb estimate of number of teachers that are required for arranging schooling of million children it is assumed that for taking care of education of children at least one teacher is required then the country would need million teachers. There are million teachers in service now. Therefore at least another five million teachers are needed if compulsory general education is to be provided to all children.
Children of different age groups learn differently. Therefore role of teachers for taking care of teaching-learning at different stages of education vary correspondingly. For teaching preschoolers competencies required in a teacher are different from those that are required by an elementary school teacher which are different from those required by a secondary school teacher which are different from those required by a senior secondary school teacher and which are different from those required for teaching at the tertiary stage.
For each stage of education specialist teachers are required for teaching different school subjects such as languages, mathematics, science, social science, humanities, physical education fine arts etc. In addition for taking care of education of children with special needs in an inclusive environment teacher requires special skills particularly the ability of identifying the learning need of each child and selection of learning aids appropriate for that child.
There are many tasks that a teacher performs which go beyond imparting the basic skills of reading writing and arithmetic commonly associated with what a teacher normally does in a primary school. Teachers are expected to teach as per the curriculum take care of all round development of children develop abilities such as learning how to learn problem solving creative thinking which are crucial for living effectively in the world rapidly changing with the developments in science and technology. A person who does not possess the skills and competencies required for the tasks expected of the teacher cannot be called a teacher. Therefore in the present context of schooling it would be counterproductive to the objective of education to reject that teaching is a profession and teacher is a professional.
