03 August 2000, 807 words
After leaving UWI, I taught for over three years at the Moruga Composite school. I had several advantages as a teacher: a genuine love for language and literature, an ability to get along with children, and maleness.
Since leaving the profession, I have met up with several former students, many of whom tell me that I made English their favourite subject. But, since nearly all of them are female, I'm never certain if their comment is a testimonial to my teaching skills or my naturally curly hair.
In retrospect, I think I was only a competent teacher, if that. In my time at Moruga, I was sent on only one five-day training course (for remedial reading) and that was enormously useful to me. Even before that, however, I had already begun making up my own exercises to use in my English classes. The assigned textbooks were too difficult for many of the students and, frankly, when people asked me what subject I taught, I usually said Reading and Writing.
Despite my natural advantages, I would have been a much better teacher if I had had some training before being assigned to a school. But it is one of the ironies of our education system that, although primary school teachers who have been to Training College are better teachers - and better educated - than many secondary school teachers, it is the latter who are better paid. (Secondary school teachers can take a diploma education course at UWI, but it is not compulsory and the teacher gets no pay increase after completing the course.)
It is not only government, but the teachers' union which must take blame for teachers being treated as second- and third-rate professionals. TTUTA likes to call for teachers to be better-paid, the argument being that well-paid teachers will enjoy more respect in the society.
This is only half-true, however. Even though ours is a society where money confers more status than other attributes, teachers can earn professional respect only if they are truly professional. You will not, however, hear TTUTA's leaders arguing for the creation of a system where no one is allowed to teach children until they have completed some sort of pedagogical training. Such an argument might lose them votes.
Yet such a requirement must, surely, be a foundation stone in any good education system. Indeed, given the way successive administrations, from Eric Williams's to Basdeo Panday's, have treated the primary school system, I suspect the only reason the system hasn't entirely collapsed long before now is because of the professional competence of the teachers.
Such training for would-be secondary school teachers could be done as part of people's first degree at UWI or could be a post-graduate degree, as happens in Canada. This plan would have the not-inconsiderable benefit of helping ensure that those who go into teaching do so because they have decided to, not because they can't find a job elsewhere.
Not only would this help restore respect for teachers but, just as importantly, it would engender a sense of competence in the people who go into teaching. They would not only be better at their jobs, but they would <Italics>feel<Italics> better about their jobs.
All this, however, is just secondary (pardon the pun). As long as the primary school system is producing children who cannot read or write or compute, universal secondary education must, logically, remain a pipe-dream. Even before the opening of the new school term, the Government has been forced to admit this, when Education Minister Kamla Persad-Bissessar said that the children who will be going to the "Model Schools" are reading at the level of seven- to nine-year-olds.
The Model Schools, like YTEPP, are an additional drain on taxpayers. Both should be seen only as stop-gap measures, while the deficiencies that make them necessary are dealt with within the school system. (It is no accident that the best education systems in the world, in countries like Singapore, the Czech Republic, Japan and Bulgaria, all make great efforts to help slower students keep up.)
But such a plan would take more than a five-year term to implement, which means that at no point could a government easily point to positive improvements in education. This is why no administration has ever undertaken serious reform of the system. And the UNC regime is the worst of all: they have set up a "plan" that will cause more chaos, and produce more failing students, just so Basdeo Panday can have an election slogan.
But what else can one expect of a Government that prefers to spend $800 million on airport expansion, $80 million on a beauty pageant and $30 million on restoring Whitehall for the Prime Minister, instead of on teacher training, curriculum development or school repairs?
Copyright ©2000 Kevin Baldeosingh