Teachers appear mostly to internalize the issues that affect them in the delivery of the service that they provide. Those issues are both personal and professional, ranging from a feeling that the profession is undervalued by the meagreness of the emoluments which it attracts, to what has become a disposition of depression, in some instances, despair, over the decline in societal recognition that was once associated with teaching.
As individuals and even as groups, however, teachers are usually conservative in their expressions of protest, preferring to express their feelings within groups that might include family, friends and trusted professional colleagues. Official representation of their causes falls within the purview of the Guyana Teachers Union (GTU).
The meagreness of teachers’ emoluments are not always their biggest grouse. Teachers who regard the profession as a vocation are usually less vocal about their personal welfare and more animated about the condition of the profession itself. As far as pay is concerned, they argue that there was never a time when teachers’ pay was anything to write home about, but that at least there used to be the reward associated with being part of a prestigious profession and that that is far less the case these days than it used to be several years ago.
It is the loss of that recognition that sometimes appears to trouble teachers most. The prevailing condition, they say, reflects itself in myriad ways, ranging from the physical conditions in which they are expected to deliver the service they provide to what, in their view, has been the near complete loss of authority in their relations with their charges.
The former concern is, in effect, a comment on the state of disrepair into which many state schools have fallen and the serious deficiency and in some cases total absence of necessary materials with which to do their work. They bemoan the fact that the Ministry of Education has, over the years, allowed these deficiencies to fester and has even sought to blame teachers for the deficiencies in education delivery rather than recognize that the absence of an enabling environment serves as a disincentive for both teachers and students.
The issue of the prevailing conditions in some state schools and the absence of remedial attention has come to be interpreted by teachers as an indication of official disregard for the profession and it is this, in many instances, that is responsible for feelings of disillusionment. Some teachers admit to taking more ‘sick days’ and being less amenable to going the extra mile. “I don’t mind saying that at the end of the school day I want to get away from both the school and the children,” one teacher says. There exist feelings of being burdened by the routine of having to function in schoolhouses and classrooms where roofs leak, floors threaten to give way and there is not enough furniture to go around, and conditions of work often affect output, in many instances, seriously so.
The decline in the image of the profession, some teachers say, has become even more apparent in the radical change that has occurred in the relationships between teachers and their charges. Time was when the reputations of teachers went before them; children subjected themselves to authority, complying out of a recognition of and respect for those reputations. That, for the most part, is no longer the case. Teachers have suffered a near complete erosion of their authority in the face of a tidal wave of confrontational, often violent children unaccustomed to recognizing adult authority, even in their own homes, in some instances; and they are not about to cede authority to teachers.
The stories are familiar. A surfeit of violence blights the school system. School gangs have become commonplace. Teachers no longer necessarily serve as a wedge between some semblance of good order and chaos in schools; they have had to retreat from their gate-keeping role in the face of successive waves of aggression that have left some of them victims of violence and others, of intimidation. How much is your sense of self worth as a teacher eroded when you discover that drugs are being sold on the school premises but you are afraid to report what you have discovered? There is that and more; teachers complain about children whose parents possess such frightening reputations that they (the children) are virtually beyond being disciplined in the school system. Weapons have become commonplace in schools, and while teachers are not unmindful of their responsibility for ensuring a measure of discipline they have become more mindful of the possible implications for their own physical safety if they are overzealous in the pursuit of that responsibility, so that in many instances they simply look the other way.
If the arguments associated with improving the education system usually revolve around investing more heavily in training teachers and equipping schools, the feeling that there is rather less focus on addressing what one might call the social issues associated with the weaknesses in the education system appears to be widely held among teachers. “Not much that we do is likely to work if the relationships between teachers and their charges are informed by aggression on the one hand and a feeling of being intimidated, on the other. Part of what helps a teacher get the job done is the aura of respect that he or she exudes. When that goes, everything goes,” one teacher said.
The issue of loss of prestige and recognition which many teachers bemoan may be far more complex than we (and here, one is inclined to include the Ministry of Education) suspect. Teachers regard that prestige as a necessary tool with which to deliver the service they provide. It is a kind of ‘image is everything’ perspective, which contends that teachers are far more likely to be effective in the classroom if their status as figures of authority does not come under threat from squalid working conditions (which have been ignored by the authorities over many years) and – in more recent years – confrontational and violent charges whose dispositions are buttressed by parental example.
There may be more that needs to be done to fix the problems in our education system, but there are teachers who believe that it is the breaches in their own ‘front line’ as the gatekeepers of the education system that must first be fixed if the more elaborate remedial measures that are so often bandied about are to have any lasting effect.
