From teaching to Guiding

From teaching to Guiding

Gautami Challagulla

The counseling for engineering and medical colleges is on the verge of completion. The huge campuses and grand classrooms will welcome the to-be-engineers and to-be-doctors. There will also be welcome speeches by the management, assurance speeches by the anti-ragging, sexual harassment committees. Two months down the lane, all these will inevitably be followed by news reports of ragging, suicides and other atrocities. This is the cycle that one has been seeing for more than a decade now.

In the last decade, after several discussions and debates, establishment of anti-ragging committees and sexual harassment committees in the colleges has been made obligatory. Today, all the engineering and medical colleges have these committees and many rules and regulations have been formulated. Despite all these efforts, the number of cases of ragging, sexual harassment, acid-attacks and suicides have not reduced. This clearly shows that mere setting up of such committees is not a complete solution to prevent such incidents. The role of these committees is usually restricted to reprimanding the accused. So, it is mostly only a legal or disciplinary action that is taken, but there is no emphasis on a behaviour change. The recent incidents of suicides and murders even by students of the elite institutions only re-iterate the fact that good quality of academic education does not necessarily shape students into strong and sensible individuals. Neither the faculty who impart the academic education nor these disciplinary committees really try to imbibe the moral values in the students. 

In the era when parents are busy, the responsibility and role of an education institution to act as a ‘guide’ becomes more important than ever. One method to mitigate such incidents is the establishment of counseling centers that would have a team of psychologists and faculty members who would attend to the emotional concerns of both the potential victim and the potential accused. Students with any concern like not being able to cope with the course work, liking a co-student, having troubles with peers etc can approach these counseling centers and express their concerns without hesitation. While these centers might not become panacea, they would certainly guide the students in handling the situations with maturity and sensibility. Another simple method that any faculty member can employ is, instead of punishing the unruly and ignoring the disoriented students, take some time out, talk and understand such students’ mentality.

Seeking inspiration from success stories of Narayana Murthy is important, but imbibing principles of Vivekananda is also necessary.