Professional Ethics

 Is there a difference between a job  and a profession? Undoubtedly, yes, there indeed is! A job would always give you a salary, but not often satisfaction. May be, it need not be your vocation. Definitely not your avocation. A job is for the pay cheque, right?

When it comes to your vocation, and certainly when it comes to your avocation, you are not much concerned with contacts, promotions, power, power positions, pay packages. These are absolutely irrelevant.   An avocation is the call of your soul. You follow that path, however much untraversed, because both the final destination, and this narrow lane which leads you thither are your dream.

Does that mean that whatever could be your job is a mere compromise? Does that grant you the permission to care for it the least? No way because that is where professional ethics walks in.

 One may not like the job. One is there because one has good contacts in the field, and so one lands the job easily.  In fact, much much better candidates with far far superior abilities do not get it because of your connections.

Let us look at a concrete example. Most often, most people are in to teaching because they would get a permanent position with the seventh commission pay, thanks to their wonderful contacts, and often deep pockets. Often  Daddy or Mummy or Guide Sir or Hubby would have reserved, even created, the position for such people.

Do such people care about the student clientele (for them!), the discipline or the branch, the subject or the 'paper' they teach? Most often, not! Teaching for them is a routine rut. 

Most often, they would not conduct lectures under some pretext or the other. If they actually teach, they would pontificate most indifferently with the help of the same notes (at times, 'guides') made almost once and for all. Their own hold over the subject would be nothing to write home, or anywhere for that matter, about.

During staff meetings, they would repeatedly discuss in detail the syllabus design, but never ever the actual content because 'friends' are to be 'maintained', contacts cannot be offended, no? Who cares, how does it matter if the perfectly structured syllabus has no depth, or the actual texts chosen are centuries old, are not relevant to the current contexts, to students' needs and/or their futures?

 So long as a typical format gets followed (which even a set computer programme can do), and your 'friends' are 'satisfied', why worry about the contents? Who cares about the objectives of education? THAT is the total lack of professional ethics which murders great institutions, and education, and the society in the final analysis! 

Pratima@Lack of professional ethics kills you (and completely) to begin with, and then you murder the very spirit of everything. No waters of all oceans can clean that stain on your conscience, if any at all!