– Maya Menon, Founder-Director, The Teacher Foundation (A highly respected Bangalore-based teacher development organisation)

The deed is done! The cockroaches have won, at least for now. The people have risen, Union education minister Dharmendra Pradhan has resigned. The month long protest and hunger strike by Sonam Wangchuk, an educational reformer, social innovator and environmental/climate activist from Ladakh, along with three student leaders, at Jantar Mantar, fanned out to major Indian cities and reached its crescendo with the brutal crackdown on July 20 by the Delhi Police.

Between early June and late July, what Indian citizens witnessed – and many participated in – was an unprecedented surge of support for the unusually named informal organisation, the Cockroach Janata Party (CJP). What began as a joke and a satirical social media movement in response to the remarks made by Chief Justice of India Surya Kant, somehow captured Gen Z’s zeitgeist and political imagination. The movement that emerged was peaceful, joyful and irreverent – a potent combination that fired up not just the youth of the country, but also their parents. Slogans were chanted, songs were sung and posters with hard-hitting and tongue-in-cheek messages were paraded around. A carnivalesque atmosphere hit the streets of Central Delhi where men, women and children from diverse socio-economic backgrounds, rubbed shoulders in the sweltering heat. They walked, stood, slept, fanned each other and kept nightly vigil. Caste, religion and political affiliations mattered little.

What sparked the movement was a genuine collective concern about the corruption that has become endemic in India’s national examination system.

And then the Delhi Police and Rapid Action Force carried out their violent crackdown on Monday, July 20. They lathi charged young men, women, even children; they cruelly beat them with rods fitted with nails or with electric charge, threw tear gas shells at point blank range and even used pellet guns to riddle the bodies of some protesters. This provoked nationwide outrage – opposition politicians protested and sections of the public across the nation got fired up to join the protests. And within five days of the Delhi police’s unwarranted violent action, the protests brought down an education minister and the CJP secured some assurances from the Union government.

Much has already been commented about the genesis and trajectory of this phenomenal protest movement. But I want to focus more on what it offers as lessons, insights and careful considerations for all of us who have toiled for decades in school education.

Lesson 1: The ’forced’ resignation of a minister will not magically transform our education system. It may however be an assertive start for citizens to demand a more responsive governance of arguably the most essential services in our country – quality education for every Indian child. So far there has never been a public uprising in India over education. This is truly the first time that education has been discussed as an issue on a national platform. But there is so much to be done across all states in India.

Every single state is guilty of paying lip-service to the quality of public education. We need much more than reforms in public exams and entrance exams like NEET. We need a far deeper grassroots movement to address the fundamental challenges facing our goverment schools such as teacher accountability, quality of teaching, quality of school infrastructure and resources, etc. We need teachers to nurture every child under their care and in their classrooms. These are the bare minimum expectations from a country that has made education a fundamental right of every child.

Lesson 2: The protests exposed the deep-rooted flaws in India’s governance culture. The majority of our public servants operate from the ‘colonial master’ mindset – whether the police, the politicians or bureaucrats. Public servants forget that their salaries are paid by taxpayers and ordinary private citizens. Instead in their official capacities, they don’t think twice about keeping people waiting for long despite having a scheduled appointment, nor apologising for the delay. They also believe it is their job to view citizens’ queries with distrust and vindictiveness and to quell all forms of dissent or people distress by any means.

Time and again, we witness disturbing scenes of injured people being hauled away by their arms and legs as if they lifeless bodies. Why do we never have collapsible stretchers and other more humane means of carrying people from public sites in India?

So the lesson here would be for us citizens to request, even demand to be treated with respect. This lesson needs to begin young, when children are treated with gentleness and respect by adults, especially teachers. When we treat dissent in the classroom as an opportunity for respectful dialogue and debate rather than heavy-handed disciplining, meaningful learning flourishes.

Lesson 3: There is immense value in being able to leverage joy, fun and irreverence to communicate serious ideas. It’s not just about creating viral memes and effective social media posts. It is about tapping into the universal human need to feel connected through shared emotions and humour has far greater adhesive power than anger.

So the lesson here is for teachers to have a finger on the pulse of their students and to package learning within threads of fun and transformative experiences. For eg. the recent protests could have become a powerful civic learning experience, with students participating in, interviewing, documenting and reporting on the movement through podcasts, newspaper articles or short films.

Lesson 4: Being able to recognise when public opinion is going against you for very valid reasons and being receptive to the feedback, is a vital and humbling life lesson for all leaders, including teachers. This in no way diminishes you. Mistakes happen, even with the best of intentions and when genuinely done, an apology is disarming and healing. Not conceding to an error in judgement or decision is a sure recipe for an inflated sense of importance of ourselves and our position. One needs to accept failure with honesty, grace and fortitude. Everything is transient BUT people should always take precedence over powerful posts. Let go of grudges and thoughts of revenge and remind ourselves that “this too shall pass”.

Lesson 5: The importance of listening to those you are responsible for. When people genuinely listen to each other without ego, pent up hurt feelings are released making way for healing, differences melt away, problems are shared enabling solutions to surface.

However the onus of listening is always on the person with more power in the relationship. This means in a school, the onus is on the principal to listen to their teachers and on the teachers to listen to their students. A caring school is a listening school and a caring nation is one where its government and its leaders listen to its citizens’ views and feelings and address their needs.

Finally, as they say, actions speak louder than intent and words. Good governance, whether of a school or the nation begins with leaders walking their talk with integrity and imagination. People are moved, even inspired by that and institutions and nations can then flourish.

Also read: Turning International Education into Career Capital for Indian Graduates