Take a grandiose name – India Poised, Lead India, Teach India, package it as a mission of national significance and voila – you have a marketing campaign of award winning significance. And if it remained a marketing campaign alone, that would be fine. Unfortunately, something like Teach India involves the lives of children and their education
The TOI ad talks of citizen teachers… I wonder if these volunteers with no professional training can be allowed to be called teachers even if prefixed with the term ‘citizen’. What next? – Citizen Doctors?
(At the least, it might be worthwhile to check with ASCI if some citizen’s complaint on such creative license will be admitted.)
The TOI, through the Teach India campaign has occasionally done some reasonably good analyses of the situation of education in the country. Some of the pieces have even identified that the solutions lie in working with larger issues related to discrimination based on caste/class, gender and in addressing the woeful lack of governance. Then pray tell, how did they arrive at the prescribed solution – well-meaning volunteers who share 'knowledge'
Sure it does wonders for the well-meaning souls who bask in the warm glow of their halos after a 2 hr session every week. In the same way that we feel less guilty after chucking a two-rupee coin at the child on the signal. It’s all about me after all – And the giant marketing machines merely feed off that!
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