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Dec 09, 2021 Features / Columnists, Peeping Tom
Kaieteur News – People say, “Those who can, do. Those who can’t, teach.” These people are ignorant. Teaching is much harder than doing. Not only must teachers have a comprehensive grasp of whatever they are teaching (i.e., they can “do”) but they must also possess that rare talent for effectively imparting information. Teaching requires an extremely specialised set of skills and the ability to relate to people on a personal level – often to people with little interest in learning.
The preferred mode of modern education is to round up all the children in the country, lock them up in small rooms and have adults talk at them for five hours. That they manage to learn anything at all under this regime is solely due to the achievements of the teaching profession. And indeed, that we have been able to do this on a national level, so that every child gets a free education is one of the great achievements of the modern age, though this claim is slightly undercut when you hear parents bemoan the vast sums they must spend on uniforms, textbooks, exams, food and transportation.
Nonetheless, free universal public education is a great and important thing, and it is of the highest importance that this education be of excellent quality. The ever-dispassionate Sherlock Holmes, looking down at the first such schools in London praised them as, “Light-houses…Beacons of the future! Capsules with hundreds of bright little seeds in each, out of which will spring the wise, better [nation] of the future.” If pupils are the seeds of the nation then teachers are its gardeners.
Yet teachers in this country are underpaid and undervalued. We have decided that educating our country’s citizens is semi-skilled work (despite the rigorous training required) and should be compensated as such. The low pay of the job means that people who would otherwise be passionate about education are forced to seek other employment. Often schools have to enlist freshly graduated ex-pupils as teachers, despite them having no formal training.
None of this is to suggest that teachers are innocent little angels. Quite a lot of them are arrogant little megalomaniacs who may have gotten into the profession with good intentions but are only still in it for the privilege of terrorising helpless little children. You know the sort of teacher I mean – they spend half their day screaming at children, happily humiliate them for minor infractions, and somehow know every little bit of gossip at the school, whether about pupils or teachers.
These deserve not so much to be fired as a whole firing squad. People like this leave indelible marks on children’s psyches, the scars of which will haunt them for life. So why do we keep them around? Partly because of understaffing, but mostly because they tend to be extremely good at instruction – perhaps it’s because they actually enjoy their work.
And they aren’t even the worst offenders. No, the worst of all (apart from, obviously, molesters and other abusers) are the ones who refuse to teach in order to attract pupils to their lessons. These people (they can hardly be called teachers if they do not teach) abrogate their duties in the pursuit of profit (shameful but not incomprehensible, given their low salaries), but even worse they strike a blow against the very principle of free, universal, education. They are little better than vandals, smashing up Holmes’s lighthouse, opening the capsules and choking the budding seeds.
So how can we address the issues with the teaching profession? The first step is to turn it into a real profession, one with standards as high as law or medicine or accountancy. Teaching is just as important as the first two. Teaching must become an elite profession with regular certification, continuous training and a move away from our present obsession with exam results. How will teachers manage this on top of their already burdensome responsibilities? First, they should be banned from giving lessons. Second, there should be a reassessment of the duties involved in teaching, and a good deal of the cumbersome paperwork and bureaucratic overhead involved in teaching must be streamlined or eliminated. Third, they should be paid more. A lot more. At least double. Maybe triple.
Doubtless the teachers’ union will find my proposals offensive. Much of their membership would not survive this new regime. There would be strikes. Resolving this conflict would be a serious political challenge. I leave it to you, reader, to decide if our leaders are up to this task.
(The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the opinions of this newspaper.)
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