Recently the Ministry of Education came up with new strategies to improve basic education skills which are reading, writing and arithmetic for pre-school and standard one to three students. The ministry says that there is a growing tendency in our school system to have students in standard three who cannot read, write and count.
For quite some time now, many stakeholders in education have insisted that what we need is not new strategies but the implementation of strategies already put forward but have not been put into practice such as providing enough books, libraries, laboratories, lunch for day scholars and a good teacher/student ratio in each class, which according to our national standards should be about 45 students per teacher. We all know that this ratio is far from being so because the average class has between 60 and 100 students.
In this article I would like to reflect on an important issue that we do not always talk about. This is the fact that we need happy teachers who enjoy teaching and who desire to see their students succeed. We need to have teachers that have vocation to teach, teachers who feel that their contribution to humanity is to educate children, to inspire them, to make them reach the heights of success in this life. The kind of teachers who taught me many years ago enjoyed teaching and volunteered their time on weekends to help examination students without being paid. These were teachers indeed.
What we need as a nation therefore is to select our teachers-to-be very carefully, to select candidates who have a vocation to teach, candidates who desire to change the lives of children through good education.
Then such candidates should be sent to teachers’ colleges that prepare them to be great teachers, mentors and models for students. Once qualified these teachers should be well paid in their work. Well paid teachers will enjoy teaching, will wake up every morning eager to go to class. Happy teachers will improve our education by leaps and bounds.
In the university where I served as professor in the USA, they spend 80% of the entire university budget on salaries and benefits for teachers. I was happy to be part of that university. I enjoyed teaching there. This is why I believe that happy teachers will help to improve our education significantly.
A Chinese saying goes this way: without inspiration the best powers of the mind remain dormant. We need happy teachers to inspire our children.
