Teachers alone can’t solve social ills

There is little doubt most public schools are failing the poor. They produce examination results we ought to be ashamed of. Consequently, society has unflinchingly blamed teachers in entirety for the under performance.

But is society justified in lambasting the teaching fraternity? I believe such a stinging indictment is rash, considering the dynamics of society in the last decade.

More families have slid into grinding poverty. Such changes have affected the context in which schools are expected to "meet standards".

Many teachers in public primary day schools attest to the fact that pupils do not do their homework because there is neither electricity nor fuel for lighting homes.

It would, therefore, be naive to wish away the correlation between the millions of children living in abject poverty and the nose-diving performance, especially in public schools.

In the same vein, because of the hustle and bustle of life, few parents ever have quality time with their children.

In the absence of a role model, parenting is almost left to ill-equipped teachers who have increasingly found themselves unable to cope with the rising psychological and physiological needs of students.

Cultural pressures

Sadly, society has always imagined teachers alone can overcome "social, cultural pressures and inspirational gaps" children are faced with.

It would be fallacious for society to expect teachers to play the entire cast. Society must take a bigger share of the blame.

Ironically, the Government, too, points an accusing finger at teachers. Yet it has done little to address these changes. It has buried its head in the sand.

What is even more disheartening is to see the dalliance between Government and the private affluent.

The Government has been seen idolising them by openly ignoring the public’s demand for quota system of admission to the best secondary schools.

This has resulted in the majority of students from private academies securing a huge chunk of the limited admissions.

To justify this inequality, the private affluent have gone to a great extent of hiring academic gurus to come up with glistening discourses that laud the yawning socio-economic gaps between public and private schools.

We have heard them opine that given the necessary push (in our context, Free Primary Education) socio-economic status does not affect the academic performance of a child!

This is akin to taking up some cast-off item and imbuing it with unsuspected beauty and mystery.

The effect of such discourses is to condemn the victim’s malnourishment on the victim’s feeding habits and ensure no attention is given to the nutritive value of the morsel given to the victim.

The same trend is replicated in secondary schools and the universities where the rich take competitive courses.

From the foregoing, it is clear teachers alone cannot achieve the aim of education.

It would be more profitable for the society to give attention to how resource allocation and partnerships might be achieved to better the academic performance.

{Tome Francis, Bumula}

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