Teachers can't go it alone

The growing concern about the quality of teaching at our early-childhood, primary and secondary levels has prompted Nadine Molloy, the Jamaica Teachers' Association president, to call for an improvement in teacher quality. Rightfully, she went on to state that all players in the system be held accountable and called for support through testing and diagnosing students for developmental/learning problems. She also called for adequate and appropriate training opportunities for teachers, adequate resources and for improved working conditions.

As a nation, we can't hope to improve education without addressing the major, glaring factors that impact negatively on it. I would, therefore, like to go one step further in calling for a concerted, systemic effort aimed at facilitating the learning opportunities of our impressionable young.

Our brand of politics has wreaked and is wreaking havoc on the people of this beautiful country. In order to gain and keep power, some politicians have created and maintained large, dependent segments of our society through divisiveness, ignorance and handouts. The resultant lack of respect for life, donmanship, criminality, indiscipline and aggression caused the powers-that-be to turn to the police and the teachers to solve the very problems that they created.

No passion

Certainly, some teachers have been remiss and/or lackadaisical in their approach to educating our children. Clearly, those individuals entered teaching without any passion for the profession. However, many of them started their career with enthusiasm and dreams of making a difference, but were frustrated and thwarted by the existing conditions and unsupportive system.

Many good and caring teachers are daunted when faced with insurmountable obstacles standing in the way of their job performance. Severe paucity of school books and requisite teaching material, overcrowding, distracted students, uncaring parents, and challenging physical conditions (to name a few) can frustrate the most committed educator.

When faced with 'students' - and I use that term very loosely - that have already been and are being 'schooled' by a community and society inundated with sex, aggression, violence, hopelessness, indiscipline, amorality, drugs, guns, dons, crookedness in the highest places, the pursuit of instantaneous gratification, greed, and role models whose fame and fortune have absolutely nothing to do with academic achievements ... what miracles are teachers expected to perform? We must be careful not to focus simply on holding teachers accountable for our failures as a society. We must explore a new paradigm. It is unfair and non-productive to expect teachers to clean up our mess - a mess that we continue to make every day.

Good parenting techniques

We spend billions of dollars on crime fighting because we don't spend enough time, effort and money on our youth. Thankfully, we now have a mandatory childhood 'passport' that records the immunisation status, and physical and mental development of our children. However, I believe that all expecting mothers should be exposed to good parenting techniques. And, we need enough social workers to monitor all children until they are 18 years old. That way, their social and psychosocial problems can be addressed before it's too late. Parents and caretakers should be mandated to attend a stipulated number of meetings with the teaching staff (not necessarily always one on one).

Even with the best teachers and under circumstances conducive to acquiring knowledge, vulnerable students subjected to negative influences before and after school hours will not learn adequately. We should use some of the time allowed for public broadcast for sustained campaigns emphasising this. The nation's future - our progeny - is everyone's responsibility. Can we honestly say we have done everything possible to allow our teachers to do their jobs efficiently? I certainly don't think so.

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