Teachers Are a Mirror of The Community
- Category: Education
- Date 14-07-1997
- 450 views
Dear editor: Stories have periodically run in the media that teachers have assaulted their pupils, battered, inflicted injury and even death on them. This has been the bitter truth. Those children have suffered at the hands of their would-be protectors.
There ha has also been a lot of socio-political furore in regard to the teachers’ treatment of school children. I even read that the Minister of Education has banned caning of pupils, and he wondered if the teachers themselves would be pleased if their own pupils were beaten (punished is a better word for it is a negative reinforcer).
In this way, the teacher has been portrayed as a source of indiscipline, immorality and cruelty. Yet they should exhibit outstanding finesse in handling their pupils and, as a matter of fact, they are role models. If the critics’ concern is the real apprehension of the nature of teachers, then there is no doubt in my mind that the credibility of the teacher is no more.
We may ask ourselves: Are teachers enemies of school children? Are they agents of child abuse? Is their training faulty? Will they destroy the education system? Or are they scapegoats? And are they all the same?
These questions have dominated the public; but much criticism of a teacher suffers from poverty of reading situations analytically. My premise is that to confront teachers in this way is to confront the larger question of knowledge in the society.
So, when we portray the teaching world as a heathen, it is the unkindest attitude to those who shape our children’s future.
This is not to defend the teacher. The culprits of this evident cruelty ought to be apprehended and exposed to the rigours of prison life. It is important to remember that a teacher must not bow out of being a specialist and assume the role of a clumsy human being. It is the demand of the teaching profession that teachers must also be exemplary in their daily life.
The reasons for caning school children by teachers are various but I will consider a few.
Firstly, there may not be enough comprehensible input with the teachers who then must tend to come to terms with the pupils (and the general school environment) by beating them. These should remember that children obtain comprehensible input in low-anxiety situations.
Secondly, some teachers use caning as a means of disciplining school children. This is far from being disastrous to a pupil provided the teachers know where it is going to lead the pupils and have worked it out carefully.
Thirdly still, the society surrounding the school system (and the teacher) is one with a history of violence. Most teachers experienced either family, school or political violence. Yet the school is essentially a preparation for participating in society, where the moral responsibility of the school and society is reciprocal i.e. a moral school produces a moral society, and a moral society produces a moral school.
The morality of the school, then, is part of a larger picture and draws much of its life from that larger canvas.
Therefore, it is unfair to pinpoint the teacher alone as the source and agent of violence against children. Only we should not forget that our teaching is partly shaped by the communal circumstances and everything we do as teachers is coloured by our own assumptions about how our students learn.
By Venansio Ahabwe
Source: The New Vision