the search for the perfect teacher

I’ve always wondered if the perfect teacher really did exist or if he/she were nothing more than a myth. Someone to see the possibilities that lay inside you, someone who understood you better than you understood yourself. That special person who took a student and saw the person he/she could one day become. The small time visionary, inventor and dreamer. All of his makes me wonder if this perfect entity is anything more than a random myth. My past experiences don’t leave me with much hope. As I look back I realize there are a handful of teachers who, I can honestly say I had the ‘pleasure’ of knowing. However who among them inspired in me to change myself from the placid person I was into a force to be reckoned with? Who was it, who drove me to get up and conquer the world by believing in me and in the process making me believe in myself? The answer dear reader, as anyone who knows me will testify is no one. Sure there have been some teachers pretending to have all the answers, unfortunately none of them have put on a very convincing show. This may appear to you as nothing more than the disgruntled ramblings of a disgruntled young woman, but the question remains. Have we in our search for that super child prodigy failed our duty to those little gems left behind?

To answer this let’s first look at what, we as a society value above all else. The answer is perfection! Anything sells as long as it is perfect. A perfect body, a perfect story even a perfect disaster or a perfect tragedy is hailed by all those who subscribe to it. The human race, after all is nothing more than a system comprising of innumerable sub systems and as a system we continue to seek that perfect mix of elements which will eventually lead to our own garbled version of Utopia. We plan to achieve this by filling our system with the perfect elements (something to do with our inner sense of Natural Selection perhaps). And so as this obsession continues to consume us, we continue to search for and select the best among us. And so the onus falls on every teacher to find the most obviously talented child and help it develop its skills while the others are gently nudged along until they find their calling through...other means. Can a teacher be blamed for this? Of course not! We dump over a 100 children on a teacher and expect them to patiently coax every child into finding their calling. Isn’t that a little unfair? We fantasize about the all knowing teacher the one who watches a child without judgement and leads it to its real path. But do we realize that it is we who have wiped out this guru. With our need for a faster solution we have managed to ruin the one thing that ensured we reach near self-actualization namely the Guru shishya relationship.

It is depressing that all we can do today is look back at what was once an almost holy relationship and a process through which many ordinary people were successful in enriching the lives of the future generation and getting a little bit closer to self actualization themselves.