The need for teachers and parents to be well-read so they can provide essential supplementary education to children has become more pressing than ever before. EducationWorld asked an eclectic mix of educationists, teacher trainers and school principals across the country to recommend vacation reading lists for teachers and parents – Summiya Yasmeen The two-month-long summer break beginning April for schools and colleges is not only a period of rest and recreation for children and youth, it also offers teachers and parents a great opportunity to catch up with their reading and education. Unfortunately the country’s 7 million teachers — especially 5.5 million primary school teachers — are notoriously ill-read. According to a dipstick survey conducted by EducationWorld correspondents in Bangalore, Mumbai, Delhi and Chennai, 90 percent of teachers don’t read beyond prescribed subject texts. The situation is probably worse in other cities, towns and villages ill-served by public and institutional libraries and/or bookshops. As the pressure to produce world-class graduates equipped to compete globally builds up, the socio-economic and extra-curricular knowledge deficit of India’s teachers is beginning to show up by way of poor learning outcomes and inadequate general knowledge of their students. Moreover given that K-12, college and even university syllab-uses are dictated by out-of-date bureaucrats and sycophantic academics, the need for teachers and parents to be well-read so they can provide essential supplementary education to children has become more pressing than ever before. “Regrettably, there’s pervasive aversion to continuous learning and inertia within India’s teachers’ community. Most of them seem to believe that acquaintance with indigenous texts such as the Ramayana, Mahabharata and Hitopadesha is sufficient general reading. Although it’s true teachers are loaded with administrative work in addition to their teaching duties, the most important cause of their poor reading habits is that government and low-cost private schools don’t have any worthwhile libraries. Therefore building libraries is crucial to encouraging them to read. A mass library movement is urgently needed to foster a culture of reading and love of books within the teachers and parents communities because education doesn’t end in classrooms,” says Arvind Venkatadari, the Bangalore-based director of the Akshara Foundation’s library programme. Registered in 2000 by Rohini Nilekani, a major shareholder of the IT behemoth Infosys Technologies, the Akshara Foundation has established libraries in 1,400 government schools in Karnataka state. While shortage of libraries is a compelling reason behind government and low-cost private school teachers’ poor supplementary reading habits (according to the Annual Status of Education Report 2010, published by NGO Pratham, 36.9 percent of rural schools don’t have libraries at all), teachers in mid and top-rung private schools complain that excessive pressure imposed by managements to deliver excellent board examination results leaves little time for supplementary or leisure reading. “Most private schools in urban India have libraries although they tend to be arbitrarily stocked. But teachers have little time to read because they are overworked and pre-occupied with correcting homework, answer scripts and monitoring students’ academic performance. Unfortunately most school managements are excessively focused…
