The pick of the playwrights, William Shakespeare (1564-1616), famously identified as the Bard of Stratford upon Avon wrote his famous line “All the world is a stage and all the men and women merely players” in the play As you like it. Whether anyone accepts or not, they have their exits and entrances. The sharp-brained Irish playwright and poet Oscar Wilde (1854-1900) put a spin on the Bard’s metaphoric phrase by adding the line “The World is a stage, and the play is badly cast.” Taking stock of the goings on in the land, both during normal times and on occasions such as elections of people’s representatives to various Legislative Bodies like the 15th poll to Karnataka Legislative Assembly, the players in the action have unwittingly proved to be living examples of Wilde’s statement which sounds very plain and simple but has its deep meaning and loud message, clearly exposing the vote-seeking flock for their lack of etiquette and despicable behaviour in public.

Peering into the abysmal state of ambience in which the society finds itself nowadays, one is constrained to look for the factors governing the unedifying conduct of the adults of the land in general, barring the well-groomed sections. Which section in the nation’s mass outnumber which other section between the two is a matter of conjecture. However, the undesirable kind in the population are holding sway upon the well-behaving lot, but what portends for the future is not difficult to visualise.

One question that looms large is: Did the highly rated teachers of the past neglect the task of grooming their wards in school into products with not only competency to face life’s challenges but also an outlook of being orderly, disciplined and law-abiding? Or, the other question: Did the earlier generation in question totally betray their goodly teachers at school stage by not imbibing the much-needed virtues, ending up with their present none-too-flattering profile? The answer to these questions takes us to the dire need of neither neglecting the role of teachers nor remaining unconcerned about the future of the land and its gen-next.

In the backdrop of the foregoing longish preamble, the just announced initiative by the National Council of Educational Research and Training of framing guidelines to assess school kids on their behaviour and habits augurs well for grooming the gen-next.