Role of teachers and teachers association in attaining

sustainable development goal of United Nations:

M.Ali Asgar

Introduction:
The concept of sustainable development in the world scales as indicated in
the United Nations development decade action report of the secretary
general is analyzed. A critical view is taken of the conventional concept of
development, where the index of development is taken as per capita income
or productivity and per capita energy consumption. It will be stressed that it
is not enough to find answer to the question of what development is, but also
to find out for whom the development is intended. The whole talk is
centered around the conviction that progress is basically the result of human
effort. Progress is for the people and by the people.
Thus if a nation fails to develop its human resources, it fails to develop
much else. When the index of development is defined by per capita income,
the index become abstract with people at the denominator, while looking
humanly, the people should be in the numerator. It will be argued that
development can not be narrowed down to economics terms only, but should
be more inclusive, where social, cultural, intrinsic personality developments
are taken into account.
The contribution of a teacher to national development, which is sustainable,
originates from his role in inspiring the students to acquire knowledge and
understanding; in creating eagerness amongst the students to know that
truth, encouraging students in their creative activity, inventiveness and
experimentation. It is this creative activity and inventiveness that ensures
sustainability of the development process.
The role of teacher’s association arises from the fact that all institutions,
specially the universities, share the common aim and ideas of seeking the
truth. Thus teaching and research of each education institution is a part of
the world of learning, and teachers are members of an international
community of knowledge seekers. Teachers association is not like workers
union for collective bargaining, but an organization where contact with
developing knowledge and exchange of ideas elicit the maximum
intellectual power for change.
This element of change can only ensure sustainability of development with a
dynamic balance of inquiry and commitment that calls forth dual qualities of
skepticism and belief. Inquiry and skepticism leads to the creation of new
knowledge; and commitment and belief leads to the growth of knowledge
and love of scholarship in the setting of community life. These leads to the
conviction that the role of teachers and teachers association are to be
reflected in professional education, research, self-government, service to the
region; and the recognition that truth knows no frontiers of race or
nationality.
The use of development index as per capita energy consumption is
considered as wrong, because this notion wrongly considers the exploitation
of energy resources irreversibly as energy production and encourages
pollution in the world scale. It is also against sustainability and green
economy while encouraging greed economy.

The concept of development:

The concept of development is rather a recent phenomenon, because the

subsistent economies of early mankind could not afford the time and energy
for planned knowledge expansion. Moreover virtual immobilization of
knowledge was necessary to ensure the existing stock of knowledge before
writing and printing were invented. This state of affairs persisted for
centuries even after the invention of printing, until the implications of
printing for storing and shaping knowledge were digested into the social
consciousness and individual physiological structure. Thus cultures remain
largely tradition directed until the implication of storing knowledge outside
the human brain was interiorized.

In most cases development is measured in terms of per capita income or per

capita energy consumption and is termed as economic development.
Although, occasionally other aspects of development are talked about, like
social development, which refers to the quality of life in respect of food,
health, housing, education, freedom of speech etc, it does not get proper
importance. The reason is that social development is difficult to quantify.
Also it is thought that social and human aspects of development atomically
follow the economic development.

Looking critically to this notion of a development, we can find many flows.

In the first place elements of social development, particularly education, can
be identified as cause of progress than the other way round. This is
particularly true in the case of countries that are late comers in the
development process. For example United Kingdom which was earliest in
obtaining economic development, did so without an early introduction of
universal education. By 1850 in the United Kingdom as in France, half the
population was illiterate, although remarkable economic growth had been
achieved in the previous period.

Other countries like USA, Germany and Japan which came to the fore later
industrialization, introduced compulsory universal education at an earlier
stage of their development process.

Although education has long been the means employed by societies to

perpetuate their way of life and value system rather than to change them, the
relation between education and development is now more causal and
dynamic. Education and social factors are closely interwoven.

According to Alfred Marshall, progress or evaluation, industrial and social,

is not mere increase and decrease of magnitude. It is organic growth
involving innumerable factors, each of which influence and is influenced by
those around it. He proposed that economic reasoning should start on
methods analogues to physics and should gradually become more biological
in ton. To this I would like to add that according to most recent
understanding of economic analysis, chaotic system should be followed
involving nucleation process.

It may be desirable to separate social development from economic

development to analyze their causal relation, but development or progress is
a complex organic phenomenon. Where economical social factors interact
enriching each other.

According to United Nations prescription, development is growth plus

change; change in turn is social, cultural as well as economic, and also
qualitative as well as quantitative.

I would like to draw attention to some of the flaws and dehumanizing

characteristics in the conventional index of economic development. If we
define development in terms of per capita income or productivity we have to
divide the national income by the population. As a result a country having to
serve more people has low rate of development in spite of high national
productivity and services. This is anti humanistic. The index of development
in my opinion should be based on the principle of maximizing the human
condition of living for the maximum number of people. Thus in the
development index the people should came in the numerator rather than in
the denominator. Thus a country with limited recourses at their disposal
serving more people should be credited and their efforts for development
should be reflected in the development index. The stress should be on the
quality of life with human dignity as also for the maximum number of
people that is affordable, using the resources is available.

There is of course an apparent contradiction between material quality of

living and the number of people sharing in it. But this conflict can be
removed if we change our notion of development from the selfish goal of
maximizing personal material consumption and do not exclude human
aspects. For the removal of this apparent contradiction between material
development goal and preserving human dignity, we have to invent a new
index of development where economic, cultural, social and humanistic
elements are all inclusive and interacting.

The other limitations of the narrow index of economic development are; it

does not comply with the United Nations goal of sustainable development
which extends over nations and over extended time. For example a country
can artificially keep the population low by immigration rules etc and confine
to short term development programs and attain high economic development
index at the expense of other nations and sacrificing long term development
and sustainability even for herself. Again the index of development in terms
of per capita consumption of energy is wrong, because encouraging energy
consumption is to encourage increasing entropy that means, disorder and
deterioration of environment. Development should be index innermost
negative entropy i.e. negentropy.

The problem facing us is striking the right balance between investment in

material capital projects and investment in educating the human beings. The
choice before a country may be to take from its productive system more
material consumer goods or more time for education. If the first path is
followed at the expense of the second, society can come to satiety and
boredom. On the other hand an initial heavy investment in education not
only for its excellence and balance of formal instruction, but also in its
ability to produce leaders of integrity, can get a country started on the road
to self sustaining development. It is the expansion of pure and applied
research, technical discovery, the training of research workers and high level
of general education that keeps an economy moving.

There is nothing antagonistic between the scientific and technological mode

of education, and humanistic and social mode of education. The first is
intended to change the physical environment using tools invented by the
technologist based on the laws of naturals discover by scientist, to meet the
human needs. The goal of the humanistic education is to change the mind
and outlook of the educated man to harmonize his human aspiration with the
real world.

Only through the expansion of pure and applied research, technological

innovations and discovery of the laws of nature, the training of research
workers and high level of general education keep an economy in the
developing phase.

Thus the faith in the possibility of sustainable development is based on the

fact that the true wealth of a nation is its people, the highest productivity is
in human capital.

The role of teachers in development:

The role of teachers in development, both cultural and economic, comes

about through their contributions to human resource development. It is now
realized by all nations that a sentiment of national unity and development of
a national culture can be promoted in the most powerful way by transmitting
it through the various levels of educational system from lowest to the
highest. Language, literature, history, philosophy, economies, sociology are
examples of disciplines that contribute to the development of a sentiment of
national and international unity. It is now abundantly clear that progress is
essentially the result of human effort and it takes educated individuals to
mobilize human resources and to create dependence. Progress can not be
expected to come from the automatic action of the economic forces.

During the late 1950s, studies of long term economic growth reached the
remarkable conclusion that the lion’s share of the observed growth of the
output in the American economy could not be accounted for by commonly
measured capital and labor input, and must be due to some form of technical
progress and new scientific discovery.
Robert Solow attributed only 12.5% of growth of output per man hour to
increased use of capital and the rest to technical change. Others came to
similar findings by their different approaches. The desired change can come
only through appropriate education which involves creativity,
experimentation and inventiveness of the teachers and students.

Sustainability of development:

Since material resources are limited and are getting exhausted at an

accelerated rate due to increase in industrialization, failed demand and
population explosion, the only way to maintain the development phase is to
look for new materials, new source of energy and new techniques of
production. At the same time there must be cultural and social changes to
cope with the changing pattern of the scientific and technological world. In
fact the population explosion, explosion of expectation and exclusive rate of
energy exhaustion can only be met with another explosion which is the
explosion of knowledge.

It is through research, creative thinking, experimentation, innovation and

reflective thinking that development mode can be continued. Sustainability
is thus directly related to research activity of the teachers and students.
Teaching is no more perpetuating the old pattern of knowledge. Due to new
scientific revolution knowledge is doubling every ten or fifteen years which
is reflected in the whole productive system. It is said that teaching reaches to
its highest level when it is shot through a thread of discovery. This is
possible only when a teacher is involved in research so that the excitement
of his own research finding, his inspiration and inventiveness is transmitted
to his students through his lectures. In short it is new innovations and
discovery that can cope with the increasing population, explosion in
expectation and high rate of exhaustion of resources. Teacher’s contribution
is most important to meet the challenge of sustainability of development.

Teachers association is important because they are members of an

international community of scholars, irrespective of their place of work.
They must sink their individual inspiration in the common objective of
expanding the frontier of knowledge and understanding where many
hundreds of minds combine.