I am a teacher at heart. I love the teaching profession, but am increasingly concerned about the caliber of teachers we are breeding. Each year, the government pumps a lot of money into Funza Lushaka, a sponsorship programme developed in an attempt to fill the gap we have in the teaching profession. I believe this programme was developed after the late Kader Asmals exit from the education ministry (Im too lazy to look it up). It is all good an d well to train as many people in a profession, but is another to train people who are just going into the profession only because they are being sponsored. The chances of them giving it their all are slim. I do not agree with the approach the country has taken with regard to training teachers. With teaching being an essential service in any economy, we cannot continue to treat it with wet hands. The state of our nation would stand a better chance at improving if our young ones were offered quality education, something we lack. Teachers would also stand a better chance at doing a better job if the incentives were good. As is stands, the government has overlooked teaching and teachers have to resort to strikes every other year to get paid a fair wage. Kader Asmal, in his term, did away with teaching colleges. I think this was a huge ass mistake! We have a lot of teachers in my family and they went though these teaching colleges. These are people who grew to love the profession and were trained both in the professional and theoretical aspects of teaching. These are the people who brought me through school. When the teaching colleges were done away with, Asmal had tried to absorb the students into formal institution of higher learning and FET colleges. This did not work out very well, mainly because in a university like Unisa (which has taken up almost 70% of the teachers which need training), theory is the order of the day. Professionalism is left out at sea. In my opinion, this is the major reason why our teachers behave so badly in classes. This is why we have teachers having relationships with children, some ending in rape cases. Why teachers drink on the job and have no respect for the work they do. Professionalism is amiss.
Posted on: Mon, 25 Nov 2013 10:08:57 +0000
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