Where is the Education system headed?

Mar 16, 2009 Letters

Dear Editor,

With the retiring of many of our senior education personnel annually, the Education system becomes poorer in terms of skills and expertise born from experience.

In the field of teaching many of our current managers look favourable at retirement as creating scope for promotion. While this may be so, many such replacements fall far from being satisfactory.

I know of cases where head teachers retire, thus leaving the next in line to act as head teacher.

Often, these individuals do not possess the skill and competence to take over and so disaster steps in; general breakdown happens.

I can cite two secondary schools in Region Four which have Department Heads acting in the position of head teachers for a number of years. For those who manage our education this is not an important issue. For the Ministry of Education, recruiting a retiree on a contractual basis to manage is not a good policy.

Hence, the school, the children and the community are made to bear the irreversible consequence. It has been truly said that a retired teacher is equivalent to two of our younger teachers.

We just need to look around to see the examples set by many of our younger teachers.

Almost every school suffer to some extent from the kind of impact these teachers have on them. Lateness of teachers in almost every instance is not accurately recorded and reported by schools.

Planning for the day’s activities by teachers in the majority of cases is not done. Co-curricular activities in many cases are not treated with the same importance as the academic subjects.

Discipline and manners among children in and out of school and to some extent among teachers help to make teaching/learning difficult. Delinquent teachers whom one education writer terms as misfits are at all times given protection from discipline by their union.

Those who can help the teaching profession by being in the school even as a classroom practitioner are those who are sent to pasture, the retirees.

The Minister of Education made bold announcement over a year ago about the re-hiring of retirees. This resulted in a large number of applications to the Departments of Education.

These applications were eventually sent to the Permanent Secretary in the Ministry of Education. Unfortunately, that became the end of the matter. It is the general opinion that proper planning is not done at the top and the middle level of Education management.

Sometimes things are done in an ad hoc manner which confuses those at the bottom, who are often asked to change direction.

It is my belief, though, that certain positions, senior ones, have no clear boundaries to determine where their authority ends.

I have learnt that even in my senior position, my authority should not usurp that of the person below me.

R. Udho

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