Peter Espeut
FINALLY! SOME honesty about our education system! No less a person than the Minister of Finance has asserted that the nation - our children in school - is not getting value for money when it comes to what our teachers do. I have been saying this for years! Ultimately it is teachers who have children in front of them, and ultimately it is teachers who must teach them. If they learn, the teachers will want the credit (their slogan: "If you can read this, thank a teacher"); but if the children are mentally normal and they don't learn, then teachers have to take their fair share of the blame.
Such a view, though, has a hard time getting properly aired. The JTA resists this view. To them the problem is the "system", or the Ministry of Education, or the school board, or the parents, or the children themselves, or their nutrition - everything else other than themselves. The Ministry of Education is packed with education officers who are former JTA activists (it seems that the reward for a JTA activist is to be kicked upstairs), so don't expect the Ministry to come out asking teachers for accountability. The National Council on Education is a JTA proxy, so don't expect them to place any blame in the direction of teachers. It takes a maverick, or a man campaigning for higher office, in a rare moment of lucidity, to call a spade a spade. But don't worry, no one will comment on it, and it won't go any further. It won't even be a two-day wonder!
Both my wife and I have been teachers at the high school level, and for us it has been a rich experience. Teaching is one type of social interaction. Children respond in kind to enthusiasm in their teachers. Every day there was the thrill of the challenge to find a new strategy to reach 'de pickney dem', to stimulate them to learn. After school was filled with hours of make-up - remedial reading or repeating missed classes or extra classes - or science club, chess club, or field trips. Some weekends were spent in visiting students in their homes to talk to their parents; my wife made a practice of bringing some students to our home some weekends. Sometimes the school has to make up for absent family and home love. Teaching is a vocation, not a job.
HIGH STANDARDS
So having been a teacher myself I am not anti-teacher. Indeed because I spent five years in the classroom giving back what I got, I understand the high standards involved, and I appreciate what many students are not getting. In the nature of the education process itself, a big burden is placed on the teacher for its success. The poor performance of our education system means that teachers deserve a failing grade.
Of course it is nonsense to interpret my previous remarks to mean that teachers must get all the blame. Of course the Government and the Ministry are blame-worthy, because they have failed to create an environment which facilitates high educational achievement. Of course school boards are blame-worthy because they have failed to assess the gaps and to act to fill them, whatever the shortcomings of the Government. Another problem with the Ministry is their failure to put in place competent school boards free of political hacks. And yes, parents are to be blamed, but the task of the education system today is to break the vicious circle many families find themselves in - where poverty and deprivation in one generation is transmitted to the next. The education system must be able to overcome the deficiencies in the parents and in the home.
I would like to congratulate Minister Dr. Omar Davies for his forthrightness, but I know better than to expect improvements anytime soon. The JTA is a powerful inhibitor to improvements in our education system. Successive Ministers of Education - some of them from the ranks of the JTA itself - have been unable to control Leviathan. While proper performance evaluation is being put in place in the rest of the public sector, teachers will resist "pay for performance" until the last. Come, Minister Henry-Wilson. The ball is in your court.
Peter Espeut is a sociologist and is executive director of an environment and development NGO.
