One of the most ignorant sayings of all time is that attributed to George Bernard Shaw: “Those who can ‘do’, those who can’t teach” as it seeks to negate the teaching profession and the fact that most persons who ‘do’, unless they were born geniuses, are only able to ‘do’ because they were taught how to ‘do’.
The International Summit on the Teaching Profession, which opened yesterday in New York and ends today, was expected to reflect on a recent report commissioned by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), which says that teachers need to be given “status, pay and professional autonomy”. The report also calls for teaching as a career to be made more attractive so that it will attract the brightest students.
The report, written after an examination of the schools’ systems of some of the world’s developed and highly industrialised countries, notes that education standards will remain stagnated unless the brightest recruits could be attracted to join the teaching profession.
Traditionally, the men and women entering the teaching profession did so for the love of it; because they knew they could not be happy unless they were imparting knowledge to children. Back then, too, teachers, as public servants or in private educational institutions such as those run by churches, were paid decently and were well respected as well. Not any more.
The OECD report notes that at present, teachers across the industrialised world “are not receiving levels of pay that reflect their importance”. When one considers that the best teachers from Guyana and other parts of the Caribbean as well, flock to developed countries because they are offered better pay and working conditions than they receive at home, it gives pause for thought as to just how poor the salaries and working conditions for teachers in developing countries are.
Respect for teachers, too, is at an all-time low. Sadly, some of the blame for this has to be laid squarely at teachers’ feet. There have been too many instances where parents and guardians stormed into schools and abused teachers verbally and physically. Students also have been notorious for brutally attacking their teachers verbally and otherwise; in some cases because they are ‘chips off the old block’, or because they have problems which either have not been noticed and addressed by their parents or have been ignored.
Teachers complain the world over of having to spend as much as 20% of their teaching time addressing problems with discipline and sometimes hygiene, which ought to have been addressed at home. This would obviously have a negative impact on learning.
In this technological age also, where students’ access to information can be just a mouse click away, there is need for the calibre of teachers who have the necessary knowledge to sift through the millions of megabytes of information out there that could cloud the students’ focus.
The OECD report pointed also to the universal attrition rate of teachers. While in developing countries teachers leave the country but not necessarily the profession, in the industrialised world, teachers are leaving the profession for more lucrative jobs. Teachers are in short supply the world over and unless the issue is addressed frontally, there will come a day when those who would like to ‘do’ are unable to because they would not have been properly schooled.
Anyone can stand in front of a chalkboard and attempt to impart knowledge to students or pretend to do so. Only teachers who actually care whether it is done will make the extra effort to do so and those appear to be in short supply, which is one of the reasons why some children go through years of schooling and emerge knowing very little or nothing at all. And until policy makers grasp that it is the quality of teacher that makes the difference, nothing will change.
