On Teachers’ Day 2025, it is imperative to reflect on whether we truly nurture intellectual growth or merely populate classrooms.
By Napoleon S Mawphniang
As the calendar once again marks September 5, individuals are adorned with garlands, speeches resonate within assembly halls, and social media platforms are replete with messages celebrating Teacher’s Day.
However, this annual homage often results in teachers being remembered only once a year, with WhatsApp messages and photographs capturing smiling faces for only one day. Beneath this ritualistic observance lies a reality as stark as the winter fog enveloping our peaks; we have lost sight of the true essence of teaching.
Dr. Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan’s proposal to dedicate September 5th to all educators reflects a deep understanding of the transformative power of teaching.
His vision recognised that education is not merely about imparting knowledge, but also about inspiring a lifelong love for learning and intellectual growth.
This perspective elevates the role of teachers from mere instructors to catalysts of societal progress, emphasising the collective impact of educators in shaping future generations.
This article seeks to provoke reflection among educators, encouraging them to question rather than passively accept their comfort zones. This raises a critical question about education in Meghalaya.
By contemplating whether we have “extinguished the very flames we were entrusted to kindle”, this article challenges us to examine current educational practices. This introspection invites discourse on whether the education system fosters curiosity or has become a mechanical process suppressing the desire to learn. This prompts educators and policymakers to reevaluate their approaches, ensuring that education’s core purpose-igniting intellectual curiosity remains central to practice.
Teachers, who should be architects of dreams, have become their demolition crew. In schools across the state, most educators have reduced their noble calling to mere transactions: attendance for salary and compliance for comfort.
They arrive as clock-watchers who see potential in children only for their own advancement, and many paid huge sums to officials for their jobs through corruption.
This is not a teacher who historically remembers. This is not the guru who, in ancient India, were revered above kings because they shaped the souls of nations. We allowed the sacred to become secular and the transformative to become transactional.
The evidence is pervasive, like morning mist. Students in Meghalaya must travel extensive distances, often hundreds of kilometres, for basic examinations due to inadequate infrastructure.
They face challenges from curriculum discrepancies between the Meghalaya Board of School Education (MBoSE) and the National Council of Educational Research and Training (NCERT), placing them at a disadvantage compared to Central Board of Secondary Education (CBSE) counterparts.
However, where do educators advocate for enhanced skills for their students? Where are teachers filing RTI requests, organising protests, and questioning the systemic neglect that forces their students to endure such hardships?
Instead, our teachers’ bodies have settled into what I can call a comfortable cage of complacency.
The recent controversy over the Meghalaya Education Grant (MEG) reveals this starkly. While teachers rallied in Jowai, their protests centred primarily on job security and salary concerns. The All Meghalaya Primary School Teachers’ Association (AMPSTA) fights against the MEG, fearing it will “erode job security, especially for deficit schoolteachers.
However, where is equal passion for student welfare? Where are the dharnas demanding better learning environments, the strikes for improved educational outcomes, the movements questioning why Meghalaya’s education system “suffers from fragmented policies and weak monitoring mechanisms”?
The MEG controversy provides a deeper story. Teachers fear a “single-window grant system” because it threatens their entrenched positions.
However, they fail to ask harder questions: Why does our state rely so heavily on government-aided schools-29% compared to the national average of 5%? Why do we accept an education budget “spread thin due to underutilized schools and overlapping administrative costs”?
National Education Policy 2020 was meant to herald a new dawn for Indian education. In Meghalaya, its implementation crawls forward like a wounded animal. Yes, we have formed “State-Level Task Forces” and introduced “Four-Year Undergraduate Programmes”. We speak of “multidisciplinary courses” and “mother tongue instruction” and native language instruction. However, these are administrative victories and not educational triumphs.
The real measure of NEP’s success lies not in committee formations, but in classroom transformations. Are our teachers fostering the “critical thinking and the multidisciplinary approach” that NEP envisions? Are they becoming the “torchbearers in shaping students’ character, resilience, and emotional well-being”? Silence in our classrooms suggests otherwise.
Meanwhile, our students languish in a system designed more for political convenience than for educational excellence. The “skewed distribution of higher education institutions, with urban centres like East Khasi Hills hosting most of them, exacerbates regional inequalities”. Rural children are abandoned to their fate, while teachers remain silent and are more concerned with their Central Provident Fund calculations than their students’ future.
Teachers of Meghalaya, I write to you not as judges but as fellow citizens who believe in the transformative power of education.
You hold the key to our state’s future, yet you have allowed yourselves to become prisoners of a system that values compliance over courage.
Looking to history for inspiration. Great teachers have always been rebellion. Socrates questions everything until Athens silences him. Rabindranath Tagore abandoned traditional education to create Santiniketan.
Dr. A.P.J. Abdul Kalam moved from missile scientist to the people’s president because he never stopped teaching.
Today, students are poised to inherit a complex situation in Meghalaya, characterised by corruption, environmental degradation, and economic stagnation.
They will encounter a world where the “modern education system is perceived as a scam” unless there is a fundamental transformation in our approach to learning. The question arises: Will you prepare them to be passive recipients of this flawed system, or will you equip them to become its reformers?
It is imperative for educators in Meghalaya to transcend comfort zones. They should file Right to Information (RTI) requests concerning the Education Grant, not only to safeguard their employment, but also to reveal the misappropriation of public funds in the education sector.
Why must students seek high-quality higher education in Guwahati and Delhi? It is essential to question why the state government regards educators merely as “pay master” employees rather than as integral partners in the process of nation-building.
Most importantly, it transforms your classrooms into laboratories of critical thinking. Teach your students to question authority, challenge corruption, and the dream of a meghalaya where merit matters more than connections.
Research shows that “teachers play a crucial role in achieving” educational goals and must be empowered for “continuous professional development”.
Preventing suppression of aspirations and fostering ambitions are crucial. Our state’s future depends not on politicians but on the intellectual development of those you educate today. Every exceptional student needs an outstanding educator, and at society’s core is an educator who rejects mediocrity.
On Teacher’s Day, we face a pivotal choice: perpetuate superficial traditions of garlands and speeches as education deteriorates, or embrace teaching’s transformative essence-the courage to challenge, inspire, and construct futures, rather than merely occupying time.
The students currently in your classroom possess the potential to either emerge as leaders who will transform Meghalaya or remain passive citizens, thereby contributing to its continued decline.
The responsibility for this outcome, esteemed educators, lies with you. Will you persist in contributing to the problem or will you become the solution that our state urgently requires?
On 5 September 2025 let us not merely commemorate educators, but challenge them to recall why teaching was once the noblest profession.
We must urge them to fulfil this vocation, not just for their dignity, but for every child who believes education can transform the world.
This transformative movement originated in the educational setting. The question posed was: Are you prepared to assume a leadership role in this endeavour?