This year has begun on an unfl attering note. The headlines have been a mixed bag tilted in favour of the grim and the news far from uplifting. Standard and Poors downgraded the credit rating of nine of the Eurozone countries with France and Austria stripped of their triple-A ratings. This indicates the precarious fi nancial position of Europe and confi rms the concern that the economic downturn of the past few years may have taken root. Global economic growth has slowed down, which will have severe consequences across the board and specifi cally for the poorer parts of the world. The video of four American marines urinating on the corpses of three Taliban fi ghters in Afghanistan circulating on the internet caused disgust and dismay and refl ected poorly on the behaviour, character and training of the marines. In U.K. one in ten children between the ages of eight and sixteen is unhappy and has a low sense of well-being. In Iran, a series of attacks on nuclear scientists continue with another scientist working at a facility killed in a magnetic bomb attack. It is widely believed that Israel is behind these attacks in its bid to reduce Iran’s capability to develop nuclear weapons and undermine the parliamentary elections scheduled for March this year. The concept of assessing happiness instead of economic growth as a measure of progress initiated in 1972 by the then King of Bhutan has unceremoniously been turned on its head by a report by the free-market think tank the Institute of Economic Affairs. Based on various data obtained from 126 countries, it has concluded that the most important indicator of happiness is wealth and the “government should forget general well-being and concentrate on boosting fl atlining GDP”. Two items of news, coming from miles apart, from the UK and from here, regarding school education, focus on different aspects but are closely linked. The UK Education Secretary has voiced his deep concern about “bad teachers” who, under current rules, can only be removed after a year of service and are then sent packing with glowing references to cause further damage to students at other institutions of learning, which was famously described as “the dance of the lemons” by Joel Klein, a former head of New York schools. The UK, which arguably has the best system of school education in the world, is also suffering, like India, because of underperforming teachers that are diluting the quality of education being imparted. As far back as the 1990s, a former UK chief inspector of schools rated highly as an educationist, had declared that there were 15,000 incompetent teachers. By all accounts this was a staggering fi gure at the time and over the years the decline in standards points to the numbers of such teachers rising to worrying levels. And it is the children that suffer with many not only facing a year of poor performance but a loss of interest that impacts adversely on their longterm achievements and occasionally wrecks promising futures. Proposing plans to remove bad teachers within a term and have their dismissal reported in their record, the Education Secretary rightly addressed the public with these words: “You wouldn’t tolerate an underperforming surgeon in an operating theatre or an underperforming midwife at your child’s birth. Why is it we tolerate underperforming teachers”? If this is indicative of the scale of the problem in the UK, then it is not diffi - cult to imagine the gravity of its predicament in India. The news at home is sombre. Our 15-year-old high performing students who took part in the Programme for International Student Assessment, conducted annually by the OECD to evaluate education systems worldwide, were ranked second last among the 73 countries that participated in a two-hour test sat by half a million students. Our children were 200 points adrift of the global topper fi nishing way behind the Chinese and the South Koreans in Maths, Science and Reading Skills. The writing is on the wall but we cannot be unduly disheartened for it was for the fi rst time that our children participated and they were drawn only from Tamil Nadu and Himachal Pradesh. The outcome should be treated as an opportunity to refocus on our system of education and reassess the quality of teaching in our schools. Although children from India are setting high standards of achievement and competing with the best in the US and UK, a great deal still needs to be done for our children at home before they can compete at the highest levels on the global stage. Modernising our system of education would be an important step forward but what surely would make a world of a difference is a major change in the selection process and training and development of aspirants for the teacher’s role. Teaching is a very serious profession and there is nothing perfunctory or fi ckle in its nature. Teaching is certainly not for those who are not committed and passionate but see it as a convenient pastime or as a stopgap measure. No one does greater disservice to children and future generations than teachers who do not appreciate the demands of their role and fail to fulfi l their responsibility toward their students.