Are teachers trained with the capacity to raise decent human beings, as requested of them?
“In learning you will teach, and in teaching you will learn.” ― Phil Collins
Suddenly, there is a plethora of teacher training programmes. Yes, the training of teachers has become fashionable! Imagine that! (As we say in Nigerian parlance; let me shake tables in the education sector today!).
The key area in the development of teachers in the majority of these seminars is the building of welcoming and respectful school climates and classrooms and not in enhancing students learning.
This, in my humble opinion, is the crux of the matter. We have forgotten that the purpose of education is the end user, which is the student. In these seminars, the emphasis is on the pedagogy (methods by which teachers teach), driving home the message that the basic and fundamental competences of the teacher are to teach, to mold students mostly in academic matters and to assess their conceptual understanding.
However, when I look closely at these competencies, the emphasis on ‘understanding’ is a shallow one. These teacher trainings dwell upon knowing what, knowing how and wanting to do, which are essential in the training process. Yet, we forget what a huge role the outside world (beyond the walls of school) have upon the types of human beings that the teachers are; their worldview, the meaning of life, their guiding beliefs, their underlying paradigms, and ultimately their skills in being able to create meaningful human relationships with students – which have not been tackled with the precision and prominence that such trainings demand.
All over the world, it is accepted that education accomplishes a social function that trains individual skills to perform to the benefit of society in general (human capital), and invests people with the skills, attitudes and dispositions to relate to others with respect (social intelligence).
A superior education is one that confers decent people with ethical values and makes them respectful of others. Yet for education to progress towards the central achievement of these goals, it needs to surmount a great obstacle. When we compare the roles of various professionals, we see that doctors are only expected to tend to their patients; there is no requirement for them to improve their patients’ morals; and the same goes for engineers, who are only expected to build infrastructures that stand the test of time. The CEO of a company is required to increase the value of the shares of the company and the wealth of its owners but has no mandate on the morals of the employees.
Moving forward, what are the necessary lessons that we must teach educators so that they can build the integral formation of students?
The demands of these occupations are in line with the training they received for practicing their professions. In contrast, for educators, in their training the emphasis is placed on disciplinary, pedagogical and didactic knowledge. Potential educators are taught, according to their subject areas – mathematics, chemistry, physics, language, or whatever aligns with the degree they graduate with.
Yet, when an educator begins to teach, s/he is required to ensure that students learn the subjects s/he is assigned to teach (and has hopefully been trained to teach) them, while also influencing them to become decent human beings.
I have serious misgivings about this. Are teachers trained with the capacity to raise decent human beings, as requested of them?
Moving forward, what are the necessary lessons that we must teach educators so that they can build the integral formation of students?
Right now, from my personal observations and experiences, our school environments are centred on obedience, discipline and fear. This make it hard to structure alternative learning environments.
This necessitates the need for revamping the seminars for teachers. Now that is the real work as it means a flipping of mindsets and that is another article for another day.
Adetola Salau; Educator / Speaker / Author/ Social Entrepreneur / Innovator
She is an Advocate of STEM Education and is Passionate about Education reform. She is an innovative thinker and strives for our society & continent as a whole to reclaim it’s greatness. She runs an educational foundation with the mission to transform education.
E-mail-:Carismalife4U@gmail.com
Facebook-: Carisma4u
Twitter-: @Carisma4u
Website-: www.carisma4u.com