It’s not easy being a teacher in contemporary India. Besides attending to the needs of the students in classrooms, they navigate various institutional demands and responsibilities. Teachers today face a complex landscape of technology that is both alluring and fraught with ethical complexities. The old image of a teacher in repose, ever ready to ponder the complexity of contemporary life, seems to have undergone a change. The hyperactive teacher is the norm today in a world that, as the social critic Jean Baudrillard pointed out, has become hyperreal due to technological advancements. Some techno-managers of schools and universities, in fact, have made it official: Teaching is new-age technocratic management!
The celebration of the technologically determined behaviour of the teacher has an Indian context as well. Last year, the Government of India launched the “India AI Mission”. In her Republic Day address in 2025, President Draupadi Murmu said that India will be a global AI hub by 2047. OpenAI, an American artificial intelligence (AI) organisation based in San Francisco, California has opened a unit in Delhi and announced that India is poised to be a global AI leader. Such congratulatory prophesies are punctuated by the ominous revelation that everyone is going to be a consumer of the AI based services. This isn’t surprising given that India is the second largest market of ChatGPT in the world. Technological advancement will add value to human life if its effects are analysed early on, in a context-sensitive manner. The teacher’s role becomes critical in this respect.
Central Square Foundation, a non-profit that collaborates with the Government of India, to prioritise EdTech in school education, recently came up with a survey report recently. The study, “Teaching with Technology: Early Adoption of EdTech by Indian School Teachers”, revealed that about 70 per cent school teachers across India are tech-savvy. But what does tech-savvy mean? By adopting smart phones and computers, these seemingly smart teachers perform well in the classroom. Or so the administration of educational institutes believes. The idea of audio-visual demonstration in the classroom is a litmus test of sorts for a good teacher. The survey too goes by it. The integration of technology and AI in pedagogy and the use of cutting-edge components in the classroom could, no doubt, be progressive.
However, this celebration often overlooks the other side of the story, that is about the human agency and transformative capacity of the teachers and students. In an ideal condition, the teacher and the taught enter a dialogic relationship that fosters trust; that’s a first step towards creating knowledge that promises emancipation. The acclaimed Black feminist pedagogue Bell Hooks could do wonders in her classroom precisely due to the pedagogic alchemy that wasn’t dependent on technological smartness.
Another concern has come to the fore of late. Put simply, it is about teachers using ChatGPT to make notes and disseminate curricular content in the classroom. But why is there any institutional panic if students do the same to write assignments for evaluation? The ambit of EdTech thus becomes a turf for ethical contestation. Teachers ensure that students are not using unfair means in the examination. That students do not copy and paste is a clarion cry of the teachers in the staff meetings. At institutions of higher education, there are various disciplinary committees to check the fairness of means in the examination conducted to evaluate the merit of the students. There are strict mechanisms to regulate even the written works of the teachers. A detailed plagiarism check is integral to the normative order of writing and publishing. In such a situation, the question is whether EdTech alone ensures that teachers perform the “smart role” they are assigned today.
In all this, is there a place for the intuitive qualities of the teacher? Unlike the policymaker’s and school administrator’s demand of techno-smart instructors, Rabindranath Tagore perceived the teacher to be a guide as well as a learner who learns with the students. The teacher in Tagore’s understanding leads students from dependence to independence, from unfreedom to freedom. Technology, too, can be liberating. It’s up to policymakers and school administrators to give teachers space to use technology to innovate. On Teachers’ Day, let’s ask: Can pedagogy embrace technology without losing the humanistic ideals at the core of teaching and learning? Will that be possible in the backdrop of the rat race to embrace AI in teaching and learning? There is no quarrel with the need for “smartness” in classrooms, one that’s bristling with creativity. Much depends on the meaning of smartness and translating that idea into practice. As things stand, AI is becoming another instrument of the status quo, not an emancipator or one who encourages students to question, because school administrators want teachers to be techno-managers.
All may not be well with so-called smartness in the classroom.
The writer is associate dean, Faculty of Social Sciences, South Asian University
