Why teach old dogs new tricks - Saleshando

CHANDAPIWA BAPUTAKI
Staff Writer | Thursday April 8, 2010 00:00

 

The Gaborone Central legislator was addressing teachers at the Botswana Teachers Union (BTU) congress of delegates at the Goodhope Senior Secondary School under the theme 'People solidarity against poverty and oppression'. 

He said the Ministry of Education and Skills Development is demotivating the young teachers by training teachers who have been in the profession for ages. 'It is like telling them to join the queue and wait for their retirement years before they are considered for further training,' Saleshando said.

Debating 'The Quest for the Empowered Teacher in a Global Society', Saleshando said that the biggest challenge was the economic slow down, which Botswana is recovering from.  He said Botswana is receiving reduced revenues whilst costs are going up.  He said the education ministry could argue that education has been costly with the construction of school.

'It will get to a point where the ministry will have to make hard decisions even though the security budget has doubled with the DIS getting the larger amount as if they were forming a new police force,' he said, explaining that the challenge at this time should be 'doing more with less'. 

He further stated that there are many indications that the quality of education has gone down dismally from primary to tertiary education. 'There is no surprise there because the focus has been more on quantity than on quality. It has not been about the quality of the teachers but the number of the students that pass through the classrooms,' he said. 

Saleshando stated that it is time that the education ministry reflects on the minimum qualification of the teachers and work from there. 'A few years ago, there were many temporary teachers without qualifications,' he pointed out.

He also said that the recent mushrooming of private institutions is worrying. 'Experience from other countries has shown that private education is not the right tool to deliver education. They are commercially driven by the market,' he said, citing the example where parents approached him last year when their children's results from an institution in Gaborone were withheld for malpractices before the examinations. He said that could have been done to release deceptive results that would be then used to attract potential students.

Log Radithokwa from the University of Botswana said that teachers should be motivated by passion when they are fighting for their rights and welfare.

He said the reason why the teachers and other workers are not moving anywhere is because they have not taken themselves seriously as a country.

'Teachers sound like they are volunteering their services,' he said, urging them to always vote for people they think will support their cause in Parliament and advocate for their issues.

He said many teachers have lost the passion for teaching and if one can check they might find that the majority of them are job hunting. 'Then there are many teachers who want to use their education to make a change in the school but the environment does not allow them to,' he said.

Professor Richard Tabulawa from the University of Botswana said that teachers are not empowered to produce the calibre of graduate that is in demand globally. He said teachers have not been involved in the development of the blueprint of the curriculum.

He pointed out that the Revised National Policy on Education was established as a response to globalisation but it is very restraining to the teachers. He said the teachers are now requested to teach according to the stated objectives so are now not in control of their work.