September, the beginning of a new school year, is also designated as “Education Month”. From the very start of our education system following the abolition of slavery in our country, education was seen as providing the wherewithal to secure real freedom. Not only would it provide the training necessary for securing a job but also the values and world view for living a “cultured” life. Education was the passport from a world in which life was “nasty, brutish and short”.
But it was soon realized that education was more than a matter of constructing schools: mortar and bricks or boards and beams do not educate. The foundation of all education is teachers. Because of their key role in liberating the population, teachers quickly acquired an elevated status in our post-slave societies. They held in their hands the key to the good life. The status of teachers did not depend on their salaries: in fact the other professions were always more lucrative.
Their status depended on the seriousness with which they viewed their task: theirs was a vocation and not a trade. Teachers must have a passion of teaching and those early teachers certainly had that passion. That passion was not confined to the classroom, for learning did not end at the doors of the school. Teachers were very active in the affairs of their community and were crucial in the creation and maintenance of local democratic institutions.
Today as we look at the hundreds of new schools that have been built on the coastland and in the interior but recoil at the terrible results exposed by the latest CSEC examinations, we must re-examine the role our teachers in this sorry situation. Are our teachers, by and large, imbued with the urge of changing the lives of their charges by opening up their minds? Sadly, we have to answer in the negative. Only a small minority of teachers see their profession as a vocation.
Larger salaries are only part of the answer: in Trinidad and many of the CariCom countries, the salaries of teachers are almost on par with those in the developed counties but their results at CSEC are not noticeably better than ours. Unquestionably, teacher salaries will have to continue rising, as they have been doing since 1992, but their attitude will also have to change.
At present, most teachers have a view of teaching as a “can’t do better” way-station, in which they have become, or may become, stuck. This attitude is transmitted to students in numerous ways, not the least being a reluctance to be creative in the classroom. For many students, teaching means a teacher reading from a textbook at the front of the class. This cynicism is reinforced by the “lessons” maneuver practiced by many teachers: the curriculum is not completed in the classroom but at “lessons” for which the same teachers charge a princely sum. This is the quintessence of treating their profession as a “trade”.
Teachers will never regain the status they once had even though they complain of its loss, until they conduct themselves as professionals. Respect, which is the basis of status, cannot be demanded: it must be earned. And it will never be earned by gouging students for knowledge that should have been delivered in the classroom in the first place.
Just as critical as the substantive aspect of the knowledge transmitted by the teachers of the past was the manner in which they practiced their vocation. There was a dignity and gravitas in which they comported themselves in and out of the classroom. Education is not only about the “3R’s”: it is even more about values that will guide the learner in his conduct with others in society.
As the first President of independent India, and a great teacher in his own right, said: “Teachers need to be leaders in their own right, capable of proactive thinking, open to changes and challenges, able to inspire, motivate, demonstrate by example and finally with a realisation that they have a huge responsibility of nation-building.”