The problems bedeviling the education sector especially those revolving around students’ discipline cannot be solved by teachers, whose hands are tied behind their backs by the laws passed to manage the sector. If a teacher cannot do much to curb any indiscipline except watch and write a report later before being fired, then a new way of doing things is what we currently need.
It’s a reality that the teachers are being blamed for roles that they are either poorly prepared to handle or are completely unable to handle them. This is for instance, charging the teacher with the duty of ensuring that school buildings are not destroyed by rowdy youths is just farfetched because there is very little he can do if the students are bent on destruction. The case of Itierio High School principal being interdicted after the razing of several dorms by students yet he was in Mombasa attending a conference is a good example of blaming the wrong person.
If the ministry is serious about curbing the destruction and a host of other mistakes, then it will be fair if they employed professional managers to run the schools and allow teachers to perform what they are trained for-teaching.
This will lead to a situation where our schools will be run like universities and some colleges where the teachers simply teach and assess the learners. They are not directly involved in the administrative duties of the day-to-day running of the institutions. The managers will ensure that schools have infrastructure and students to be taught. The same manager will organize that the students get food in the right quantity and quality and will also ensure that the learners are accommodated if the school is a boarding one.
The managers will ensure that they have disciplinary systems that work in the ‘modern’ way that teachers have been portrayed as being unable to cope. Professional counselors will be stationed in schools to ‘talk’ to the students and this role will be lifted off the teacher’s shoulders. Always have it in mind that teachers rue the absence of the cane, the same measure that is considered by the ministry as ‘barbaric and inhuman’.
The teacher figure in our society has been battered systematically over time and the pitiable bit that is remaining has very little authority today, hence cases of teachers being assaulted by their learners just for the fun of it.
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