Mrs Metcalfe's story

According to one Professor Metcalfe, head of Education at Wits University in South Central Zone One, aka Jozi, formerly disadvantaged citizens are 'shunning' the teaching profession, with less than 20 percent of newly qualified 'teachers' being drawn from that population group.[Business Day 19/3/06] Whether this is true is unknown. When I showed this article to a room full of colleagues one said that he was frequently at the Linder [a theatre on the local education campus] and it was always full of formerly disadvantaged citizens. I don't know if that was a meaningful statement.

There are validating statements though from other interested bodies that point to the same situation of declining numbers of aspirant teachers from the newly advantaged class. Presumably being newly advantaged means that there are far more lucrative opportunities for the brightest and the best. But we have no real evidence and these people may be using an inadequate base from which to build their argument. For instance anyone wandering around the campus of the local teaching academy would not see many formerly advantaged persons but would certainly be inundated with those who are newly advantaged.

Be this as it may, Professor Metcalfe attempts to put a spin on this circumstance digging up many plausible reasons why dark humans are 'shunning' the profession but the fact remains that apparently in practical terms five people leave the business for every new recruit. Those who are graduating are inadequate [in numbers] to the task apparently. Inevitably we will have too few teachers to do the job of educating the young. According to the Professor the profession is seen as lacking opportunities. Gosh-I wonder why. And is it really a problem-I don't think so.

Perhaps it has something to do with the historical nature of the job. Perhaps it is because the Professor and the rest of the educational prattling class have forgotten that they have cancelled the word 'teacher' from the new lexicography of OBE and converted all such persons [myself included] into classroom administrators.

The new OBE system actually requires that children educate themselves [bizarre as this would seem]. That is why they have been renamed 'learners' in place of the old term 'pupils', and it is the function of the 'classroom manager' [formerly teacher] to construct and maintain and environment within which that learning can take place, and carry out a battery of assessments. The 'Teacher' has now become an 'Administrator'.

And in a world rapidly becoming bureaucratised into a state of inertia there are plenty of opportunities for administrators to progress to the highest levels of civil administration. So the failure to encourage the newly advantaged part of the population into entering this occupation is largely because the new education authorities have themselves apparently not 'bought into' their own system.

The word 'teacher' in South Africa is a filthy noun; unlike say, in China, where the word 'teacher' evokes reverence. In our country the word all too frequently evokes contempt or disdain-especially if you are a male. I have long since ceased telling people that I engage in that activity for instance, the look of contemptuous disdain that shutters across the eyes of a listener when I mention my occupation is horrible to imagine let alone experience and witness and I have experienced it often enough to know that it's a no no-one of those conversation killers. Just reflect for a moment on your own reaction as you read this last revelation.

So I prefer people to think that I'm unemployed which is technically true since I am officially a temporary part time employee of the institution where I have worked for all of this decade-except that a part- time job as a 'teacher' in today's environment is a full time job in any other.

I am a fifth generation 'teacher', we've been associated with Harrow, the Royal Air Force and other fine institutions over that time and I have the pleasure of having been associated with many institutions myself some fine, many thoroughly unpleasant and in a few cases downright dangerous. In one institution where I spent a short time as a temporary employee during the seventies-I have never had a full time occupation in the thirty-four years since I graduated-I was issued with a standard Uzi type sub machine with a thirty two round magazine and the locking mechanism set to three shot auto. Everyone else in the room had an AK47 and many were regularly stoked up on 'boom' [or dagga if you prefer]. I had an overhead projector and a screen and over three months of five hour a day classes I managed never to turn my back on a class. There is invariably some pissed off person in every class you ever work with and the guy in the next-door class took multiple rounds one day when the student's pay and rations arrived late: he was writing on the blackboard at the time. My contract was a three-month one, which I chose not to renew.

Where was it you ask-it doesn't matter: there are guys like me all over the planet teaching guys like those the rudiments of reality. That particular group were former guerrillas who had changed sides [well theoretically] Name a team of gunmen anywhere shooting for any side and they've got a few teachers there -in my case teaching the rudiments of administration. So once upon a time one of them was me.

When you play word association games with education survivors [in the sense that education is like rape, with the same intent to eviscerate, innocence] you soon tap into intense dislike of teachers in a disturbing, too many people, albeit it there are those whose experiences had not bred that hostility.

When you consider the awesome power that the 'teacher' held in past eras and still do in many places, power which has been frequently abused all to often especially during our more fascist dispossession era, it is small wonder that those myriad hordes of adults who have crashed through that rite of passage harbour mixed feelings.

So for this reason we invented a new educating system, schooling from a different perspective and within it we set out to liberate the child from the oppressive domination of the Parent/teacher and replace the relationship with that of one between adults [irrespective of chronological age].

This is not easy. Nonetheless it is an essential goal of the new education system because in assuming that children can effectively learn what they must know to progress through the system, the only way you can get people to teach themselves is by treating them as adults.

What is an adult in this sense? It is in that sense represented in transactional analysis by for instance someone like Dr Alvyn M Freed [ TA for Tots/ TA for Teens]. For those who don't know what this is it's a form of communication analysis that assumes each of us to be three people [actually five but lets not get too complicated]. 'Thinking me' the rational adult, 'Bossy me' the eternal parent in all humans, and 'Feelings me' the child in us all. The classroom manager's function is to engage the universal adult in all citizens.

In other words the new classroom manager is not a 'teacher' albeit there may be elements of old fashioned show and tell type 'teaching' in a day's events. This 'teaching' is increasingly frowned upon and regarded as undesirable. It is also impractical given the sheer volume of work a modern school going human must cope with.

When a child asks a question they should ideally be answered with a question that leads them to search out and discover for themselves the answer to their query. [I am not dealing here with whether this system 'works' or not. The jury is still out on this.] The manager's job is to check the output of the 'learner' and assess whether they have achieved the desired 'outcomes' [which is far too complicated a concept to deal with in this short space but is broadly what the learner should be able to do when they finish doing.]

The new classroom manger is thus an assessment administrator, and if the education authorities are serious about resolving this alleged crisis to which Professor Metcalfe [and others] keep alluding then they should be engaging the media and spending some money changing the name perception.

To keep harking back to this deemed obsolete name 'teacher' is a critical problem because it makes effective recruitment impossible especially with ambitious young black entrants because the word alienates huge numbers of people. So the Education establishment is, in effect, in denial.

Alternatively of course the media, and particularly headline writers are equally at fault because they [quite reasonably] resist the name change which is contemptuously dubbed 'political correctness', because they choose to be unaware [or are simply unaware] that by reverting constantly to the reinforcing stereotype 'teacher' they are increasingly out of touch with contemporary reality.

One must hope that the new recruits to 'teaching' aren't disappointed when they discover that their primary function nowadays is childminding and classroom mangement. It has always been these things of course; that's why I survived the three-month stint in teaching hell, by careful mangement of a volatile environment.

Having said all this, one must also add that the job has also become the country's lowest paid hard work masquerading as a respectable profession. I know that my own workload has trebled over the past few years even though I keep reducing the numbers of classes I teach. My colleagues report the same and discontent is high. I know no one who would encourage entry into this job even though it still remains a pleasant occupation in many ways compared to, say, working in a call centre-where conditions are roughly similar and the pay comparable.

I hit the big 60 this year and my temporary short-term part time contract expires. I have the gravest doubts that I'd like to renew it. This new classroom managers job in which I have now found myself job is an administrative job and like most 'teachers' I am not a natural administrator: the one occupation is dynamic the other is passive. Teachers are active and energetic creatures, classroom administrators are essentially observers and evaluators.

My main occupation these days is keeping track of information about the kids rather than doing what I used to have to do. It's not all bad but schools are not really designed to keep track of huge volumes of bureaucratic trivia and there are other opportunities in our evolving society that pay just as badly but demand far less commitment. It is ironically because our new society actively discriminates against me [and my kind] both because I am a white man and because I am 'old' that is likely to keep me employed for the time being as a 'classroom administrator' for the shortage of recruits means that one's employers are having huge difficulties finding a successor. My present place has been trying to replace me for years, but every one they have found has been terrifyingly ineffective, albeit far better than me at keeping records; but the kids simply had no idea what they were doing and those people did huge damage to those whom they were alleged to be managing. The idea that children learn by themselves is an illusion.

In the world of Tai Chi it is said that there are four kinds of learners:
· Those who learn quickly and forget slowly.
· Those who learn slowly and forget slowly.
· Those who learn quickly and forget quickly, and finally at the bottom of the heap
· Those who learn slowly and forget quickly.

My sense is that the new system encourages the last two on the list.

Ironically today this 'teaching' business represents one of the few 'industries' in the new reverse racist South Africa where formerly advantaged citizens can be gainfully employed [if that is the right word for a job that functions on the poverty line] -whereas in the past it was one of the few places a formerly downtrodden citizen could find reasonable work, which tells us that nothing much has changed. The job is so badly paid that I am surrounded by colleagues who retired officially years ago and are still coming to work every day because otherwise they'd starve and unlike me each one of them has been paying into the pension fund system for decades.

My sense of the future though is that this anxiety over the pending teaching crisis is a misplaced one based on failure of vision. Having constructed a new education system based on the notion that children teach themselves and we the administrators assess how effectively they have 'learned' their work the next logical step is to combine our new education concept with the evolving Call centre concept and I would envisage schools twenty years hence as places where kids check into their computer console each day- log onto their learning machine and work through their lessons using computerised information processing instruments and the Internet. Technically they wouldn't have top leave home although the 'school centre' would in all probability still function for social purposes-after all most meaningful learning in schools takes place outside the classroom.

They would have to complete their tasks and complete the assessments within certain designated time frames as do the new information technology workers in the new factory-type call-centres, which exercise control over their employees in ways the architects of the industrial revolution could only dream of. The highly trained child-minders over whom Professor Metcalfe and her ilk are presiding with more and more anxiety would effectively become as superfluous as we aging cadres of the former teaching profession find ourselves to be, with all our excessive and redundant knowledge.

Cheers
The Bloggist NiK.