4 min readSep 5, 2026 09:54 AM IST
First published on: Sep 4, 2026 at 04:35 PM IST
As we watched the student protesters at Jantar Mantar, one question that few asked but that needs to be raised is this: What kind of teachers inspire them, what kind of teaching will touch their lives, address their fears and doubts and yet celebrate their individuality? Let’s not forget that the students were protesting the leak of an exam where teachers were the ones who broke their trust, teachers who passed on the paper to parents who were willing to pay. Also, when you can learn from YouTube, ChatGPT, when there are algorithms that answer every query before a teacher can finish framing it, when Siri and Alexa decide what is right and wrong a hundred times a day, what should a good teacher do?
One easy response is to further police the student. Ban the AI tool, detect plagiarism, force a return to pen and paper, keep raising the exam bar, categorise students as winners and losers, celebrate the unicorn founder, forget about the majority of students who are unseen and unheard. That puts the burden in the wrong place. The real question is not only how a student should adapt to the transformative technology of AI, it is how a teacher empowers the student to do so. Can she walk into a classroom with her own mind and hold it? Can she be, once again, a Socratic teacher?
Socrates never wrote anything down. He worked by elenchus, drawing out what a student already half-knew. Plato recorded those dialogues and built Western philosophy on them. Confucius did not lecture his students; he gathered them, ate with them, mourned student Yan Hui’s death as a father mourns a son. Ramakrishna Paramahansa and Vivekananda were bound by something no curriculum can schedule. These are the models, East or West, worth reviving. Not the teacher as a lecturer, content-deliverer, because then she will always be competing with a machine that will deliver content faster, but the teacher as an intellectual guardian, as the one with the moral compass outside the safety net of parents, friends and family.
So the discipline required now falls on the teacher, not the student. Can she conduct a 90-minute class with only a whiteboard and a marker, trusting her own knowledge rather than a PowerPoint? Can she make everyone in the classroom feel part of the class, each one on her own arc but all united by the common purpose of learning? When Albert Einstein arrived at Princeton in 1935 and was asked what he needed, he reportedly asked only for a desk, a pencil, some notebooks, and a “wastebasket for my mistakes”. That is a teacher’s real skill – a mind willing to think in front of students and be seen thinking, mistakes included, and make sure that there are wastebaskets for both her and the students.
This is harder than banning AI in an exam hall. It asks a teacher to become again what a machine cannot be. Someone who knows the student’s name, notices the bad week, asks the follow-up question that has no single correct answer, and stays in the room after the bell. Aristotle believed morality could be learned, not memorised, through the cultivation of good habits until virtue became disposition. That is a teacher’s real syllabus. Practical and technical skills, taught by a teacher who has first built that relationship, become an inspiring inheritance rather than just a reading or homework assigned.
In the end, a good teacher is one who helps her students increasingly trust their own reason over her authority earned through dialogue rather than demanded. A good teacher makes a student evolve into a teacher and, in that process, herself becomes a better student. Happy Teachers’ Day.
Nilay is the author of Being Good, Aaiye Insaan Bane, Ethikos, and Kyon. He teaches and trains courses on ethics, values, and behaviour
Aristotle believed morality could be learned, not memorised, through the cultivation of good habits until virtue became disposition. That is a teacher’s real syllabus 
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