It’s sad, upsetting and disheartening listening to the media lately and almost everybody lambasting and castigating against the teacher as the center of the apparently falling academic performance of pupils and students in recent times.

This becomes even more worrying when i listen to those I think they should know better continuously reign incessant criticism at the teacher as the cause of the increasingly low performance of students today.

I think teachers must talk, teachers must speak out, teachers must write, teachers must be invited to radio and television programs concerning them, concerning teaching and the performance of pupils and students. Teaching is an art and a profession with its peculiar nuances which one must learn and be thought to understand. Teachers must be given some more audience on issues of teaching and learning and how the economic and social conditions of teachers impact on performance of students.

Teachers by their training are quiet and reserved, unlike the politician, you will hardly find a teacher hopping from one media house to the other preaching “his gospel” for people to listen and buy into his idea on issues that affects him irrespective of its consequence on the society.

The culture of silence among the teaching folk is really killing; it does more harm than good to both the teacher and the society. A teacher for example by our ethics is required to seek for permission from our superiors before granting an interview to journalese or even visitors.

 I do not personally have a problem with this norm but the point is that, this stringent environment within which the teacher is made to function in terms of the performance of his/her official duties causes lots of collateral as well as individual damages to the plight of teachers.

It should not be that only the leadership frontiers of teachers are always contacted and granted audience on issues affecting teachers. In fact most of the current leadership of teachers do not represent the exact interests and needs of the 21^st century teacher. Yes! I said the 21^st century teacher. The interests and needs of the teacher today is not the same as the interests and needs of a teacher in the past one or two decades ago.

 The value systems of our societies are not static it keeps changing. What constitute dignity and respect of a person for that matter a teacher two decades ago is not the same today, the dynamics have completely changed.

It’s a fact that the whole world has gone materialistic. Societies have moved from the typically morally driven value system to a materialistic driven value system. These value systems constitute the bases for passing judgments on people including the teacher regarding whether they are successful in life or not and students are part of our societies and they do know this.

These happen even in churches today, what you need to do to earn the respect of your church and be considered faithful and committed to God is to pay huge tithes and donations and dole out huge moneys during fund-raisings which is popularly called “aforebo” in many churches. Do these and the next day you are promoted to the portfolio of a deacon, chairman and other respected positions in the church.

 What am trying to say is that no one questions your source of wealth today. All society projects and glorifies is riches and opulence. You must just be financially rich irrespective of the source to be considered successful.

The question I ask is, if this is what constitutes the definition of respect, dignity and success today, how many teachers will pass this test? How many teachers deserve the respect of the church, the school and the larger society as a whole?

I am a teacher by training, I have been in active teaching for almost ten years now, I wish to state this with no equivocation that one of the predominant causes of low performance in our basic and second cycle institutions is the fact that students don’t believe in their teachers.  Students simply fail to have a reason to respect their teachers. Students don’t look up to their teachers; neither do they aspire to be like them. Student s don’t see hope in modeling the discipline and learning oriented character of their teachers which should serve as immediate trigger, catalyst and motivation to listen to and practice what teachers say and do for academic excellence. In fact, academic excellence is gradually becoming nonsense and nuisance in the eyes and ears of pupils and students. Believe it or not. The person who pupils and students will listen to, look up to and aspire to be, is that person who has driven a contemporary modeled descent car into the school compound for a brief visit for what so ever reason. Practicing teachers on the ground are witnesses to this.

 In this current economy of Ghana where accommodation and transport consumes the larger chunks of workers’ salaries, teachers are worse off. Especially teachers in the basic sector of our educational structure. Unlike our colleague teachers in the secondary and tertiary levels, most teachers in the basic sector do not benefit in any way from accommodation facilities. Sometimes, most of these teachers live in very demeaning environments, competing for the unavailable social amenities such as water and toilet facilities with our students. How can these children ever believe in you as a teacher and learn and aspire to be like you? No one talks about the accommodation needs of teachers in the basic sector these days. I ask a simple question, what is wrong for a teacher to also be given accommodation allowance like other public officials who were all thought by the teacher anyway.

A justice of a high court today benefits from accommodation allowances amounting to over $ 3000, I don’t even want to talk about our MPs and other political officials. Weren’t all of these officials thought by a teacher? Why has the teacher been relegated to the background this much?

 People must know that teachers live with their students in same societies, communities and households. These students watch and observe the living conditions in which their teachers live amongst other professionals. These  teachers and their students gets to classroom and the teacher is supposed to be accorded necessary respect by these same students for effective teaching and learning to prevail. How possible? How will teachers earn respect of their students when they continue to live poorly and no one including their students aspires to be like them?

If a teacher wants to see embarrassment for him/herself, he/she should enter the class and ask his students how many of them want to be teachers? Every teacher knows the obvious responses, both facial and emotional by pupils and students to this question. It’s a real shame!

Don’t get it twisted, individuals don’t decide who should be respected in a society, the collective societal values does that. And by these standards set by our Ghanaian society today, teachers don’t qualify for any respect by the society given the current economic conditions our teachers live in, and the school children know this. Ironically this same society run back to demand the best of performance from their children who in the first place don’t believe in their coaches (teachers). Questions I keep asking are; is the society fair to teachers? Is the government fair to teachers? Let me repeat that, today’s pupils and student don’t believe in the today’s teacher because of the poor economic conditions of the today’s teacher. Previously, society saw that to be normal and there was nothing wrong with that, and the impact of that on school children was different. This is not the same today, societies of today are more enlightened and exposed to quality and high standards of living all over the world and therefore sees poor economic conditions to be demeaning, degrading and even sometimes offensive.  

Illustratively, the plight of a teacher today may be liken to the community which once send its greatest warrior with a catapult to kill a lion. Great warrior with a catapult, how can a great warrior kill a lion with a catapult? How can that professionally trained, competent and proficient teacher who looks hungry, poor and demotivated ever sound and appear convincing and impressive to a highly materialistically influenced modern child seating in front of the him? In the first place what is the consequence of learning to your economic condition as a teacher? And why should this child believe in what you teach him/her if he /she does not look up to be like you and aspire to ever be like you some day? This is the difficulty of the 21^st century teacher. Very Paradoxical!

It is strange and overly disingenuous to limit and confine the cause of the deteriorating performance of pupils and students in recent times to just absenteeism of teachers as indicated by the government. That presumption is simply inaccurate, baseless and preposterous. Yes there is the problem of absenteeism of teachers to contend with as a nation, but that should not be trumpeted, magnified and assumed by the government to be the biggest cause of the increasingly poor academic performance of students and pupils today. 

I am a teacher, very effective and hardworking teacher as that, but I am a victim of the gross disrespectful and increasingly contemptuous treatment teachers suffer from pupils and students of today.  With this amongst other embarrassing encounters and experiences I have had as a teacher on the ground, I Simply can’t help but come to a conclusion that the comparatively low economic social statuses of teachers constitute a major contributory factor to the low performance of students today. It is not surprising that the greater impact of this problem is felt within the basic and the secondary sectors of our education system where pupils and students largely dependent on their teachers and are expected to believe in them, look up to them and trust in what they are thought.

 It is obvious that if these continuous pretense from the society, governments and other stake holders that be do not stop and nothing significantly and proactively done about the economic conditions of teachers, there probably will be more miserable performance of pupils and students in the future even when all teachers are in school all day.

Peter Suaka is an English Teacher at Tanoso Model JHS, Sunyani.

Contact me: suakapeter@yahoomail.com , 0200922728.