IT IS time we stop wringing our hands about Jamaican teachers being offered jobs in England and some school districts in the United States. And it will do no good trying to frustrate such recruitment by threats of legal action under the Work Permit legislation, the fulminations of Mr. Bailey of the Ministry of Labour notwithstanding. Recruiting organisations will find ways around the roadblocks, using advertising and the Internet, for example; and teachers, like other Jamaican citizens, should be free to make up their own minds about their future careers, here or abroad.
We may regret the loss of good teachers, some one thousand to date or about 5 per cent of the total teacher cohort, but the right to personal freedom of choice in a global economy must be allowed to take precedence over national inconvenience, especially in light of how poorly our teachers are paid.
If we are really serious about education, the loss of teachers should be a challenge to correct some of the weaknesses in the present system and to make the kinds of changes which would help teachers on balance to resist the blandishments of the recruiters.
Paramount among such changes must be increasing teachers' remuneration. In the present system teachers are paid poorly and we settle for mediocrity as a result. Government must regain the moral high ground pay teachers at a competitive rate and then demand the best of them.
We have many good teachers in the system, a truth to which the overseas recruitment drive is itself an ironic testament. But we also have a lot of poorly trained teachers, a truth of another sort to which the low CXC passes in Mathematics and English are a scandalous testament. It is time professional optimists stop obfuscating the crisis under the guise of spurious patriotism.
The National Council on Education (NCE) which represents a wide cross-section of informed and interested persons, has, we understand, formally adopted a set of recommendations which were sent to the previous Minister of Education and are now before Mrs. Maxine Henry-Wilson, the new Minister. The central vision of these recommendations is the urgent necessity to place priority emphasis on early, pre-primary education.
The NCE recommendations also include increasing teachers' remuneration by 50 per cent over two years, licensing teachers and raising the entry requirements of Teacher Training Colleges. The new Minister should not miss the opportunity of coming to grips with these recommendations, encouraging public discussion of them and generating the political will to get them implemented.
THE OPINIONS ON THIS PAGE, EXCEPT FOR THE ABOVE, DO NOT NECESSARILY REFLECT THE VIEWS OF THE GLEANER.
