Education exemplars

In Japan, teachers enjoy a status equal to doctors or high government officials. This is almost surely one reason why Japan has such an effective education system. A child will not learn facts or values from someone they don’t look up to. In his book Boys and Girls Learn Differently!, pedagogy researcher Michael Gurian, speaking about kids between 11 and 15 years of age, says, “(T)eachers play a far more crucial role than we have wanted to admit. We play it even more strongly than we did a generation ago, for the extended family, family and other support systems are now generally shattered… For many middle schoolers, the teacher is one of a bare handful of the most stable presences in the child’s life… middle schoolers of all kinds want attachment to the teacher. Some show it by anger, others by sadness, or silence, or attention-getting devices. There is no middle-schooler who wants to learn language arts, math, science, or any other subject in the presence of an elder she or he does not trust or like.”

So a key goal in improving our country’s education system must be to raise the status of teachers. In previous times, teachers enjoyed high status simply by virtue of being educated. Nowadays, though, educational achievement has been devalued by various factors. The oil boom in the 1970s, for instance, allowed persons who had nothing but connections to get rich, thus strengthening the crony culture of our society. But even before that, the promotion of pseudo-intellectualism, mainly by leftist intellectuals in UWI’s Social Sciences faculty, undermined real thinkers. Given Dr Eric Williams’s decision to emphasise science and technology, it is interesting that the centre of crankdom appears to have now migrated to the Engineering Faculty, judging by the absurd articles about philosophical and scientific matters which emanate from that quarter.

But teachers are the adults whom teenagers interact with most, so giving status to teachers is crucial if the adult society wants to exercise influence over its youths. But how do we do this in our culture? The first way is to pay teachers more. Unfortunately, we are a very shallow-brained society, as shown by our penchant to name things after beauty queens and sportsmen. Thus, the most effective way to ensure that students respect teachers is to ensure that teachers can drive nice cars. Without going into any detailed calculations about inflation and cost-of-living, it seems to me that, at the present time, primary and secondary school teachers should not be earning less than $108,000 per annum. Is this within the sphere of practical economics? I don’t know, but since Prime Minister Patrick Manning spends hundreds of millions on CEPEP and wants to spend half-billion more on an unnecessary Parliament building, I suspect that this wage bill is quite possible. Moreover, paying teachers will not, strictly speaking, be recurrent expenditure since, properly handled, that outlay will lead to economic expansion. At present, although the Education Ministry has often gotten the highest budgetary allocation, it ranks lowest in expenditure per employee of all government Ministries. Moreover, this country spends only four percent of its GDP on education, down from a high of six percent in the 1980s, when we should really be spending about seven percent.

So we need to spend more, but we also need to spend more wisely. Paying teachers a good salary is not enough: even in our materialistic culture, young people are smart enough to confer respect only if money is backed by skills. So teachers must come to be seen as professionals, like lawyers or doctors. This means, first of all, continual training; and that in turn means that teachers must not get more than four weeks’ vacation per year. The present vacation periods should instead be used for training and consultations. In this new system, teachers’ salaries will not be standard across the board, as TTUTA would like to be the case.

Instead, the salary levels of individual teachers should be contingent on successful completion of training courses, with extra pay for extra duties. A bonus payment for schools which exceed specified goals may also be a feasible idea. But it is equally important that training must be geared towards producing individuals who do not, in their professional roles, reflect the norms of our society: the physical aggression of MP Eddie Hart, the irrationality of PhD purchaser Pastor Winston Cuffie, the ethnocentric fact-skewing by child educator Anna Maria Mora, the empirical unreliability of psychiatrist Dr Hari Maharajh, and so on. The training of teachers must be based on liberal and intellectual tenets.

Even more important than all this, however, is getting teachers who actually like young people. “How we learn is not always dependent on how we feel about our teachers, but just as often, it is. Studies show us that memory, for instance, if enhanced is an adolescent learner feels emotionally cared for by the instructor,” writes Gurian. It is impossible to get all, or even most, teachers to fall into this category but a good training programme will help ensure that there is a sufficient core of such persons. And a sufficient core, really, may be all that is needed to revolutionise our education system. Sociologist Jonathan Crane of the University of Illinois has done a survey showing that, once the number of professionals in a given community drops below five percent, the effects on teenagers become catastrophic: drop-out rates double, as do teen pregnancies. 

Journalist Malcolm Gladwell, author of The Tipping Point, argues from such findings that “little causes can have big effects”, holding that “Social epidemics (are driven) by the efforts of a handful of exceptional people (who are) energetic or knowledgeable or influential among their peers.” But, as the incident last week at San Fernando Secondary Comprehensive showed, the adults in authority, from the Police Service to the Teaching Service Commission to the Parliament, are the worst sort of exemplars for young people. For this reason, it is all the more important to get persons with the qualities listed by Gladwell to become teachers.
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