Teachers have a social and moral obligation to reclaim their profession and restore its dignity, according to Professor Jakes Gerwel, former academic and chairman of the Human Sciences Research Council
Jakes Gerwel said that teachers need to reclaim their professional dignity in an address at a national teacher education conference in Midrand last month, pointing out that there are hosts of committed teachers in the profession who battled against legacies of apartheid, including the lack of resources. Gerwel described educators as the mainstay of reconstruction and development and said it was significant that the first value referred to in the preamble of the Constitution is that of dignity. “And teachers and schools as learning organisations are mainstays of reconstruction and development, of restoring and establishing dignity,” he said.
Gerwel said a chance remark in discussions with University of the Western Cape vice-chancellor Brian O’Connell drew his attention to the quiet but crucial role of teachers. “In the face of a popular perception that the teaching corps is dominated by people with a deficient sense of commitment, he (O’Connell) remarked that on every day of the week, thousands of teachers go out there and make South Africa work in a learning mode and environment,” Gerwel said.
“Those thousands of teachers and students who daily congregate and interact in those learning spaces, with all its deficiencies and shortcomings, hold community and society together in a manner that is so basic and simple that we ignore its impact. Imagine its absence and the physical and social disruption that would occur as a result.”
He said there was a serious lack of discipline in schools, particularly in African and coloured community schools, and a feeling among educators that the progressive rights-based foundation of the new order left many feeling exposed, unprotected and vulnerable. Teachers, he said, had their professional confidence severely dented in the period of rationalisation and curriculum changes, had left them doubting their competence in subject areas and classroom practice. “They need professional refreshment without patronisation, which would make them feel even more inadequate.”
The task, Gerwel added, is to jointly and co-operatively restore, rebuild and consolidate the working and broader environment in which teachers can perform their duties as mainstays in the reconstruction and development process. “In the end, the professional practitioners will have to assert their dignity and reclaim their profession.”
Minister of Education Kader Asmal said his department would draw up a programme of action based on input at the conference.
The conference focused on the question of teacher supply and demand, ensuring relevant and high-quality teacher education and effective models of teacher education and support. “With regard to supply and demand, we must accept the need for an audit – not as a one-off of exercise, but as an ongoing process of monitoring teacher numbers in schools and in training,” he said.
A central register of vacancies and applicants in each province would help to develop a more rational system. “We must then also reconsider the role of governing bodies in the selection process, and assess whether the process is too cumbersome to allow for speedy deployment of teachers to schools in need.”
Asmal said creative marketing strategies and aggressive recruitment campaigns were essential to deal with the expected shortages of trained teachers.
He said the importance of providing space and capacity for teachers to play a role in reconstruction and development was vital “if we are to recapture the ethos and morale”. “Teachers too must play their role since the status of teaching lies squarely in their collective hands.”
– The Teacher/M&G Media, Johannesburg, November 2001.