THE BUSINESS OF EDUCATION AND THE EDUCATION BUSINESS

Professional Train-the-Trainer workshops and seminars or conferences where one meets professional trainer and educationist colleagues, are always great fun. Anecdotes, memories, experiences, tools and techniques are freely shared, and business cards are happily exchanged.
But when it comes to discussing our professional business ethics, and more in particular when pecunary issues are involved or at stake, then all too often Mr and Mrs Silence Allover invade the platform and reign like King and Queen.
 
Prof Bushan Lal HandooThe key question is straightforward enough, though. It is, in the words of Professor Bushan Lal Handoo of IECS (Indira Educational Consultancy Services, NOIDA), whether professional trainers and educationists are in the business of education, or in the education business.
 
I sort of like the question as rendered by Professor Handoo: In the context of ancient Indian lore, logic and philosophy, it has the format of a paheli (a dilemma), or an Amir Khusrau dosukhna (a two liner riddle):

Pandit kyom na nahaayaa?
Dhoban kyom maari gayi?
Dhoti na thi!

(If you don't get my shayari, don't worry. I am afraid the lingo is ever so untranslatable, but the abracadabra of the lines above has no further bearing on what follows)

It even inspired me to come up with a modernly fabricated (and I am afraid not very wittily worded) kah mukarni (a say-and-deny quadruplet):

It was his business from morning till eve,
it took him the best of himself without leave,
it made him handsomely poor and occasionaly rich,
was it labour? well nay, it was educational bizz.

But let us leave all the fun and pun and wit aside for just one moment. And let us consider the true bearing of the question. What it comes down to then is that it should be quite evident, and I sincerely doubt that any bonafide professional would dare contradict, that any truly committed educationist has education as his life business. And by the same token, to be accredited with the title of trainer, or professor, or guru-ji, or acharya-ji, or master-ji or whatever the address may be, is a gift and an honour, bestowed upon one by others, much rather than a self-assigned title audaciously printed on a flashy business card.

Hold on a minute, for the implication of this goes quite far. It says that when education is your life business, the education of others, or in other words the measurable output of the educationist endeavour, is what matters most. And for this reason an educationist, unless she would be fooling herself and the world, cannot be self-appointed.

 
The true and effective educationist, therefore, cannot exist unless he has the concept of sharing running through his each and every vein, and in order to be able to commit oneself to sharing, there needs to be something to be shared in the first place. This means that the true educationist is a continuous seeker, and his business is in the acquisition of skills, competences and attitudes and ethics and morals and values and life experience as much as in the sharing of the same.
In this regard, I am thinking of the Buddhist concept of a teacher as a tathagata, literally one who has gone there.

Now, depending on the cultural environment in which she lives, the educationist will be esteemed, valued and compensated for her efforts in a variety of ways, ranging from simple feedback and warmly conveyed thanks, to getting a salary, a stipend, or even the settlement of purely invoicable services. In some cultural contexts, like for instance in Japan, the rewards for the true educationist will be magnaminous. In others, like for instance in modern Belgium, where my Dunya colleagues and myself happen to be located, they are generally rather scornful and contumelious.

The variety of ways in which the educationist might be compensated, is exquisitely illustrated in the pan-Indian concept of gurudakshina, which can be something as simple as touching the feet of the guru or offering him a garland of flowers, or an act as extreme and debatable as the one carried out by the unsollicited and undesired student Ekalavya, who cut off his right hand thumb in payment of educational services rendered by Master Dronacharya.

Satyajit RayWhich brings us to making a living out of being in the business of education. Feel for yourself, how quickly the chasm between this and the concept of education as a business is bridged. For, however much the educationist, by his very nature, is in the business of education, the educationist needs to earn a living, if only in order to be able to keep being an educationist. And responsible for providing the educationist with this means, are first and foremost those who have found profit in whatever it was that the educationist has shared with them. Interestingly, and significantly illustrating this point, in the Satyajit Ray masterpiece Mahanagar (1963), the retired and pennyless schoolmaster Priyogopal Mazumdar Da visits his former students on a begging tour, and insists that the money they are asked to give him should not be considered financial help, but rather payment for done services.

It goes without saying that those at the receiving end of the educational transaction are responsible for compensation only to the degree of their possibilities and at par with their profits gained from the educational process.

Therefore, ideally, an educationist, who is in the business of education, should treat education a business only on basis of measurable (tangible or intangible, either or both) results, and taking into consideration the degree of prosperity of his clients.
 
Francis Laleman