Reasserting standards in public education |
The recent developments surrounding the implementation of the Teacher Eligibility Test (TET) across India, and its proposed execution in Jammu and Kashmir through a designated nodal agency, have unsettled the teaching community in the region. The anxiety is visible, the resistance audible, and the arguments circulating in staff rooms and union statements reflect a deep unease. On the surface, the issue appears procedural: a court-mandated standard being operationalised. But beneath this procedural layer lies a more uncomfortable question about the moral and professional architecture of public education itself. If a system becomes anxious when asked to demonstrate minimum professional competence, the problem cannot be reduced to administrative inconvenience. It becomes structural.
The Supreme Court’s position on TET is not conceptually radical. The Teacher Eligibility Test was introduced to ensure that minimum pedagogical standards exist across public schooling. It is not a competitive examination for elite ranking; it is a baseline filter to affirm subject knowledge and teaching aptitude. The idea is simple: if the state guarantees the right to education, it must also guarantee that those who deliver that education meet at least a minimal professional threshold. In principle, this is difficult to contest. No society that takes education seriously can argue against standards. The question, therefore, is not whether standards should exist. The question is why the demand for standards generates panic.
In Jammu and Kashmir, the discomfort surrounding TET is not occurring in a vacuum. It is emerging within an educational ecosystem already burdened by uneven learning outcomes, infrastructural disparities, bureaucratic stagnation, and a persistent credibility gap between government and private schooling. Government schools in many rural and semi-urban belts cater overwhelmingly to children from economically vulnerable families. These are students who lack supplementary tuition, digital access, and social capital. Their only institutional support is the classroom. In that classroom stands the government teacher – salaried by public funds, protected by job security, and positioned as the state’s pedagogical representative. If that representative resists a competency test, the moral implications are not trivial.
It is often argued that experienced teachers should not be subjected to retrospective eligibility criteria. Many have served for decades, often under difficult conditions. They have managed classrooms during periods of unrest, limited resources, and administrative indifference. This argument deserves acknowledgment. Experience matters. Classroom management is not reducible to textbook knowledge. A teacher’s craft develops over years of engagement with children,........