Unqualified teachers – bane of our education system

M. A. Kaleel

A recent study shockingly revealed that 82% of the teachers teaching Buddhism in our schools were unqualified and the worst affected was the central province with 90%. The study also revealed among other things that of the 8,455 teachers teaching Buddhism a staggering 6,955 teachers recruited by successive regimes were unqualified and they should not have been recruited.

This was a front page news story in The Island of November 24 and was the Editorial in the Daily News of November 25. In short a Buddhist Nation has no competent teachers to teach Buddhism. What a damning indictment of our education.

This is not the first time the issue of unqualified teachers has been raised. Last year UNP parliamentarian Madduma Bandara dropped a bombshell in the Parliament that there were 12,000 unqualified teachers in the schools. This was the Editorial of Daily Mirror the following day. The UNP and the PA traded allegations as to which party was responsible for the recruitment of such a large number of unqualified teachers. When asked what the Education Ministry would do with them, the Education Services Minister said it was too late to deal with them (Dinamina). Therefore they would remain in the system and mar the future of hundreds of thousand students and retire as unqualified teachers.

Readers may wonder how such a large number of unqualified teachers had infiltrated the teaching profession and remained in the service for such a long time undetected. To my knowledge the major reasons are the faulty teacher recruitment systems, and the political and bureaucratic patronage. Different regimes have adopted different systems of teacher recruitments. To share with the readers a few of the teacher recruitment systems hitherto adopted by different regimes are Janasaviya Teacher Recruitment System, Volunteer Teacher Recruitment System, Contract Basis Teacher Recruitment System, Samurdhi Teacher Recruitment System, Home Guard Teacher Recruitment System, Terrorist Victims Teacher Recruitment System, Political Victimization Teacher recruitment System, National Cadet Corps Teacher Recruitment System, Competitive Exam Based Teacher Recruitment System, National Colleges Education Teacher Recruitment System and Graduate Teacher Recruitment System. Some of these systems are hopelessly ineffective and the unqualified could have infiltrated into the teaching profession through one or more of these systems with political or bureaucratic patronage.

When we say we do not have qualified teachers to teach Buddhism, what does it means? Are we short of competent people to be recruited as Buddhism teachers? No. We have ample but we have deliberately failed to recruit them and train them properly. This applies to English language teaching as well. We do not have competent teachers to teach English. The standard of English teachers is abysmally low. Teaching English in our schools and universities has been a complete fiasco. Now having lost confidence on the Education Ministry, the President’s Office has taken over the teaching of English. They look to India to revitalise English Education in Sri Lanka and a batch of English teachers has already been trained at the University of Hyderabad.

They also look to the Board of Investment and the Private Sectors to introduce English as a life skill. Meanwhile, English as a medium of instruction has also made a comeback with the same host of problems which led to its overthrowing a few decades ago, and this move has been strongly opposed by the JVP. There was also a proposal by the Eastern Provincial Ministry of Education to bring down English teachers from India to teach English in the schools in the East which was strongly opposed by the JVP provincial councillor.

Aren’t we barking up the wrong tree? There are many obvious reasons for our failure in the teaching of English but we have hitherto failed to rectify them. We do not have a proper English Teacher Recruitment System. Nor do we have a proper English Teacher Training System.

We do not have a proper English Teacher Supervision System. Nor do we have a proper English Teacher Placement System. We do not have a proper Promotion System for them. We can definitely make these systems more effective but we have deliberately failed to do so.

For instance, the Eastern Provincial Ministry of Education recruited English teacher through volunteer teacher recruitment system and contract basis teacher recruitment system and the teachers thus recruited were so poor in English. They also recruited English teachers through a competitive exam in General Knowledge and Aptitude not English. Anyone without any school education knows the problem with English teachers is their lack of proficiency in English.

But the Eastern Province Education Ministry thought the best way to maintain the standard of English teachers was to test their knowledge in General knowledge and Aptitude. Unfortunately we had no one at the Central Ministry of Education to advise against this. The English teachers recruited under these systems also included candidates with a simple pass in O/level English.

Nearly a thousand English teachers recruited under these systems were for the first time admitted into Government Teachers Colleges in the North and the East last year. Now they are in the position of the proverbial man who fell from a tree and gored by a bull. These colleges are not equipped even to train vernacular teachers. They do not have a single permanent lecturer for English. English teachers from primary and secondary schools released on secondment are their English lecturers. Their libraries do not have a single book on English language teaching. When some teacher trainees of a GTC petitioned the MOE about shortage of English lecturers, the Principal of the college threatened them in the assembly that he would fail them. He told them that their pass or failure was in his hand not in their performance because 40 percent of the final marks was in his hand.

He told them that provided they cooperated with the administration they will all pass out as English Specialist Trained Teachers or they will fail. Now they are about to complete their course but their vocabulary is still infantile and they cannot write any sentence other than a simple sentence beginning with a subject and ending in a full stop and even these sentences will have at least an error in each.

Anyhow they will pass out as English Specialist Trained Teachers-a shame for the name. They will either freely copy in the final exam, or their final papers will be set easy, or their papers will be marked leniently, or their pass marks will be lowered.

The other day I visited a school which had around thousand students but the school did not have a single English teacher whereas a popular school only half a kilometre away from this school had four English teachers surplus.

The Zonal Education Officer, a senior SLEAS officer who was the product of the Buy One Get Two Free system of promotion was least bothered about it. Having made a fine mess of English language teaching and now look to India to improve the standard of English of our students.

Education Minister alone cannot improve the education system. He also needs support and cooperation of the other politicians as well. Politicians should place the country before their self interest. For instance the Education Minister formulated a national policy on teacher recruitment recently but now I understand the policy has been shelved due to strong protests from his colleagues and opposition politicians.

Another instance is he still considers the appointment of performing principals as political and refuses to absorb them into permanent cadres and asks them to go through the normal procedures to be promoted as principals but there was a directive recently from a top politician to the Education Minister that action should be taken to absorb them into the permanent cadres.

There was another move from a Cabinet Minister to lower the educational qualification for Moulavi teachers’ recruitment to O/level from A/level but the Education Minister refused to heed it.

These incidents show that the Education Minister also needs cooperation from other politicians to raise the standard of education. Above all the Education Minister should also seriously think about revising the systems of teacher recruitment, teacher education, promotion, teacher placement, and teacher supervision. The Zonal Education Officers and Provincial Education Officers should be held accountable for anything which goes wrong in their education divisions.