Rallying Point

This being Teachers’ Day in Singapore, I thought I’d say something about the profession that is so close to my heart and experiences as well as comment on the Prime Minister’s Teachers’ Day Rally address.

A Channel News Asia report said the following :

To achieve this [develop leaders for Singapore], he recognised the need for good quality teachers, promising government support and backing.
Mr Lee added the government will also provide teachers with resources and better career advancement.
The Prime Minister said MOE will help the teachers learn and develop professionally throughout their careers.
This will be done, for example, via training courses.
The aim is to keep teaching as an attractive career.
MOE will give details of its plans to do this in a few days.

So I guess this is what hard-headed engineering solutions look like when they’re applied to Education. If there appears to be a shortage of teachers because many leave the profession, throw money at the problem by promising “better career advancement”. If teachers don’t seem to be keeping up with changing knowledge trends, just send them off on another “training course”. There seems to be nothing new in the Ministry’s bag of tricks.

The last time that a Prime Minister addressed teachers in a similar setting was in 2001. I happened to have the bad luck (or good fortune, as it turned out, given the rather novel nature of the eventual address) of being made to attend the thing. Anyway, that Prime Minister actually took a different tack to get across to the teachers: he connected by telling a tale of his own relief teaching experiences after he finished his A-levels. By telling the anecdote he expressed his gratitude to teachers for their willingness to endure the numerous challenges of teaching, which he only briefly glimpsed at during his brief relief teaching stint. And connect he did. By the end of the speech, there were people in the way-back-in-the-corner stands were I was seated waving frantically to him as if he were their next-door-neighbour. The comic aspects of the memory aside, my point is that what REALLY gets teachers usually resides in that zone of altruism normally (and vaguely) termed “not the head but the heart”. I dare say that most teachers become teachers primarily because they belief that they can touch young lives and be a positive influence. And for a brief moment, during that Teachers’ Day Rally in 2001, the room was rife with altruism. Yes, yes, teachers grow cynical, political, bureaucratic, autocratic, and painfully pedantic along the way but I think that what keeps many teachers going is the belief that they’re doing something good.

While the Ministry continues to pay lip-service to the idea that teachers can indeed impact young lives positively, its policies (summed up in “career advancement” and “training courses”) actually deny any true expression of this possibility. In the end, teachers are caught trying to avoid the pitfalls of the system (and hence advance their careers) and trapped in yet another meaningless, faddish “training session” meant to make up their quota of training hours (an privilege, they are told, but one whose enjoyment is somehow always compulsory).

A simple suggestion. Allow teachers the time and freedom to do what they’re passionate about even if it doesn’t fit into the Ministry’s pre-ordained schema of what’s productive. If a teacher reads a book (any damn book ...), count that towards his “professional development”. If a teacher keeps a blog and writes about what she loves, that should count as well. If a teacher’s thing is to hang out with students in the canteen over endless cups of coffee, why should that bother anyone? Of course teachers need to be responsible. But this should never obscure the fact (as it now does) that teachers are first individuals who each have something unique to offer rather than digits that need to be accounted for. If teachers are allowed to do their own thing in place of the meaningless forms that chart their careers’ progress, if they’re allowed to just teach to their strengths instead of adopting yet another silly and irrelevant pedagogical schema (most probably dreamt up by individuals without much classroom experience but an eye on the profits to be made off “the education industry”), much good would be done.

In order to be great teachers, teachers need the space and time to connect with their own hearts. One Prime Minister knew this and he used it to soften and inspire an oft jaded group. This Prime Minister? I don’t think he’ll be telling any relief teaching anecdotes anytime soon.