Peter Espeut ON THIS Teachers' Day, and despite other topics pressing for attention, I have quite willingly given in to my wife's insistence that today I big up Jamaica's teachers!
Teachers are very important people in the scheme of things in human and personal development, in nation-building, in sustainable prosperity for our people. After parents, teachers have the greatest influence in socialisation, on the values children take as their own, the greatest impact on self-image and how children see their roles as citizens of this country. Teachers can teach honesty, and thrift, and industriousness, and care for the environment by their example. Or the reverse!
The slogan "If you can read this, thank a teacher!" is obviously true, and on a day like this and every day we need to give the members of the teaching profession all the credit that is their due. But we must also realise that hundreds of thousands of Jamaicans who have passed through the hands of teachers, have left school illiterate, and this is still happening today.
How many of us have grown up to love learning because of the obvious relish many teachers have had for scholarship and excellence? But how many Jamaicans have been turned off subjects like mathematics forever by inadequate and inept teachers?
I have seen teachers inspire and motivate slow learners and underachievers to reach beyond themselves and find new drive and new purpose and to attain higher levels of knowledge and proficiency in reading, writing and 'rithmetic. I have seen teachers give love to children and adolescents unloved at home, give presents to children not used to receiving personal gifts, and give lunch money to those who just don't have it. These are not small and insignificant acts of caring and sharing, and most go unnoticed and unrewarded.
WRITE-OFF
I have also seen teachers write-off whole classes of students as "dark" and "dunce" and "don't have the brain for 'heddycation'", and put very little effort into teaching them anything. I have seen teachers put their favourites at the front of the class and give them special attention, and pay scant attention to those (always the boys) at the back. I have seen teachers stream whole grades according to achievement, placing underperformers together into ghettos of inferiority, and then declare that the lower streams are irredeemable. I have seen teachers shout and scream at students, telling them they are good-for-nothing-except-to-turn-gunman, and then work hard to make it a self-fulfilling prophecy.
I have seen teachers work hard to open the minds of their charges to learning, to broaden their horizons and their experiences. I have seen teachers lend students reading material from their personal libraries when the school library is inadequate. I have also seen teachers spend an inordinate amount of time carefully planning awards functions and ancillary events such as sports day and graduation, but neglect proper preparation of academic matters.
SOLUTION
Often teachers are part of the solution, but sometimes they are part of the problem. Every properly trained teacher knows the sociological factors which favour underachievement and underperformance in Jamaican schools in inner city and rural areas, yet many treat these factors as insurmountable. Knowledge of the problems is supposed to help you to solve them, not just to give you excuses when you fail. I find that too often teachers blame the victims the children for their failure to learn, when it is teachers who have the task of devising strategies that will help those particular children to learn on any particular day. If attendance is irregular especially on Fridays I expect teachers to come up with a counter-strategy, not to accept it and to leave those children out.
This is no time to rest on one's laurels. I would like to see teachers honoured today, and feted today, and pampered today. But tomorrow I would like to see these education professionals sit down and strategise how they are going to put an end to the scandal of illiterates in their classrooms, the scandal where many go to school for nine years and still can't read and write! I support a system of performance evaluation designed to detect who are the effective teachers and who are just along for the ride. I would like to see teachers work out a system of incentives for their profession, so that those teachers who succeed in educating their charges receive more monetary and professional rewards than those who consistently churn out illiterates.
The challenges to good education today are many, and I believe that most of the teachers I see in the classrooms have the capability to solve them. I wish all teachers well today sincerely! But I hope that more teachers will seek to be part of the solution, and less part of the problem.
Peter Espeut is a sociologist and Executive Director of an Environment and Development NGO.
