AS I promised while rounding off last week, we would have to continue with the discussion points here on how to ensure that we borrow some brilliance from some Nordic countries, especially Finland where they dignify and reward teachers more than their judicial officers and other civil servants.
Talking about significant Reward Package for Teachers may have been a very stale and laughable subject in our country at the moment I would like to remind our leaders and the ruling class that it is one of the issues that should ordinarily dominate even parliamentary debates in the context of nation building. We need to remember that the downward trend we are witnessing in all aspects of our lives is a direct consequence of the scant attention to funding education quality. And there is no way we can talk about education quality construct without discussing how to dignify Teachers at all levels.
There is no sophistry by authorities that can hide such truths – that unless the nation returns to where we began with respect for teachers at all levels, we will not get to where God wants us to be in the comity of nations. I mean we cannot lead the black race without constructive and intentional reforms of our education system. That is part of what why and how nations fail. It has been written several times that destruction of education quality is destruction of a nation. Our leaders hear this every day but they do nothing about continued decline in education standard. They don’t recruit good teachers. They don’t pay teachers they recruit since sadly, they send their children to schools abroad and use they money they should have invested in education to pay huge bills in hard currencies.
In an article on this same subject here in July 2016, I had called “on our leaders to bear in mind that quality in education is part of what should be pursued to address all forms of poverty, material, spiritual, social and economic…And we need to know enough to know that unless we honestly address the material condition of teachers all over the country the way Finland has decisively and comprehensively done, we will continue to grope in the dark and compromise the future of this country. And here is the thing, we need some state governments that can show even the federal government how to reform and revamp education quality through unprecedented attention to teachers who can be more important than the permanent secretaries in the state service”.
That deconstruction surfaced then at a time even the global supreme intelligence on business and economy, the London-based The Economist joined the fray in the global appeal for attention to teachers. In its edition dated June 11, 2016, the influential journal wrote in an editorial entitled: “How to make a good teacher”: Excerpts from the editorial:
“FORGET smart uniforms and small classes. The secret to stellar grades and thriving students is teachers. One American study found that in a single year’s teaching the top 10% of teachers impart three times as much learning to their pupils as the worst 10% do. Another suggests that, if black pupils were taught by the best quarter of teachers, the gap between their achievement and that of white pupils would disappear…”
The Economist continues as if it was talking to our leaders here: “Education has a history of lurching from one miracle solution to the next. The best of themselves even do some good. Teach for America, and the dozens of organisations it has inspired in other countries, has brought ambitious, energetic new graduates into the profession. And dismissing teachers for bad performance has boosted results in Washington, DC, and elsewhere.
“But each approach has its limits. Teaching is a mass profession: it cannot grab all the top graduates, year after year. When poor teachers are fired, new ones are needed—and they will have been trained in the very same system that failed to make fine teachers out of their predecessors.
“By contrast, the idea of improving the average teacher could revolutionise the entire profession. Around the world, few teachers are well enough prepared before being let loose on children. In poor countries many get little training of any kind. A recent report found 31 countries in which more than a quarter of primary-school teachers had not reached (minimal) national standards. In rich countries the problem is more subtle. “Teachers qualify following a long, specialised course.
This will often involve airy discussions of theory—on ecopedagogy, possibly, or conscientisation (don’t ask). Some of these courses, including masters degrees in education, have no effect on how well their graduates’ pupils end up being taught…What teachers fail to learn in universities and teacher-training colleges they rarely pick up on the job. They become better teachers in their first few years as they get to grips with real pupils in real classrooms, but after that improvements tail off. This is largely because schools neglect their most important pupils: teachers themselves….
“Trainees should spend more time in the classroom. The places where pupils do best, for example Finland, Singapore and Shanghai, put novice teachers through a demanding apprenticeship. In America high-performing charter schools teach trainees in the classroom and bring them on with coaching and feedback…”
We don’t need to say more than what the leader writers at ‘The Economist’ have done for us, in this regard.
As I once noted here, the point is that teachers need intense training, not the crash programme we do here through seminars. National Teachers Institute, Kaduna has proved inadequate. Faculties of Education in Nigerian universities are filled with students who never chose education subjects as even a second choice. Most of them have been drafted because of cut-off point challenges from examinations for desired courses. Besides, as I observed last week too, no one wants to teach in Nigeria where teachers are derided. In Finland, they are not only well groomed to teach, they are also recognised as national heroes and as the most important to be admitted into the universities. In that same Finland, the best students are chosen for very competitive teacher education.. What is more, Finish teachers are better paid than their peers and enjoy a lighter teaching workload than their average.
The message I would like to repeat to all our leaders here is that there will be no progress anywhere if we do not separate teachers of our children from general workers that we would not like to pay well. Let’s dignify our teachers. The starting point should be how to attract our excellent graduates, our first class brains into teaching. Yes, teaching!
Our leaders need to recognise what Professor Steven R. Covey said about the value of quality in education in 1976: He said: “The main value of education is not financial or occupational, but it is personal and spiritual and character building. You can become a better husband and father, wife and mother and citizen. You learn to think analytically and creatively…You learn how to read with discrimination. You develop a way of thinking about life and problems. Your basic knowledge is deepened and expanded, your horizons lifted… In every way you can become a fuller and more integrated, more capable and wider human being…”
I think we cannot achieve this through miracles that exclude special attention to and robust investment in teachers in our schools.
‘Funding education for global competitiveness’.
This again is the right time to remind our leaders that suggestions haven’t been in short supply by experts on funding education for country and global competitiveness here. There was a September 2017 commentary by The Guardian in which an expert on education was quoted as revealing that, “Nigerian students have become globally less competitive and that should be of great concern to the government and indeed people of Nigeria generally regarded as the most populous black nation on earth”.
That lamentation on declining quality in education came through a professor of African Religious Traditions at the Harvard University, Jacob Kehinde Olupona, who had then decried the inability of Nigerian students to compete globally with their colleagues. Coincidentally, the observation was reported when again lecturers in the countries’ universities downed tools to press home their demand for improved funding of tertiary institutions.
While noting that the country’s culture of learning is inappropriate to what is obtainable across the world, the scholar said university teachers in the country lack the needed resources to teach the students effectively. This is not new. The Guardian, (Nigeria) has repeated this point on education several times and even declared an emergency on education.
Many experts over the years have identified lack of basic learning tools and conducive environment as the underlying factors, and they have added that the students are not effectively engaged with the practices that are considered to be global. It is therefore unfortunate that one cannot agree more with the scholar’s comment that Nigerian students have indeed become less competitive in global context.
So our leaders should note that one critical factor that has sustained the greatness and exceptionalism of the United States and indeed all great nations, is the quality and the availability of quality education to citizens who desire to have it. Central to constant lamentation on education is the low quality of education in this country. It is tragic that by every criterion applied, the learning culture let alone character has virtually collapsed under the weight of neglect. Leaders have come into government, underfunded education and gone out to set up their own schools and universities that they consider better than the public’s they were elected to improve.
There is a terrible, even terrifying, problem with the education system in the land. Most of this has got to do with the governance system in education some will call educational management issues. Take the challenge of wages: With a take-home pay that hardly ‘takes him home’, how does anyone honestly expect a perennially disgruntled, poorly motivated teacher at not only the tertiary but also at critical foundational primary and secondary levels, to teach with competence, confidence and enthusiasm? In most states in Nigeria where poor revenue has become an issue, teachers bear the brunt, as they are most often, the last to be paid salaries, as I was saying.
In the world of work in modern times, money may not answer all things, despite its influence. There are other issues that are weightier than money including the environment of work. Indeed, people start out by working to earn a living but grow beyond the bread and butter factor to keep them on the job. That is so much exemplified by Abraham Maslow’s ‘hierarchy of needs’. Work environment and other conditions of service matter too. Attention to the all-important Teacher is worth considering too. The teacher is arguably one of the most important factors in an education system. A competent, motivated teacher may not necessarily be the highest paid person, but his or her infectious enthusiasm to teach and to improvise where necessary encourages the students to learn. But that is how it should be for there can be no good doctors, engineers, lawyers and journalists without good teachers.
Let’s continue this critical discussion point…
- Oloja is former editor of The Guardian newspaper and his column, Inside Stuff, runs on the back page of the newspaper on Sundays. The column appears on News Point Nigeria newspaper on Mondays.