Perspective Stephen Mpofu
Literacy in Zimbabwe is almost universally pervasive with the functional part, which relates reading and writing to practical work, a sizable component of the aggregate 91 percent rating that makes Zimbabweans the most literate nation on the African continent. Lest some smart Alec credits the phenomenal growth in literacy to the superlative highly educated cum teacher training college-capped professional, the comparative, educated but not teacher training college graduate, has played a not so insignificant role in the high literacy equation. This is because temporary teachers have held fort especially in schools in the periphery, or rural schools when high flight professional teachers have willfully remained holed up in the centre, or urban areas, enjoying the bright lights, television, better transport networks and all the other rainbows of urban life while thumbing their noses on schools in the countryside where, ironically, the umbilical cords of some of those professionals remain interred in the village where their parents also live or lived before their autumn.

Yet after serving the nation so diligently and selflessly as temporary teachers in schools especially in the pejoratively-called sticks and holistically acquiring vital knowledge enriched with their cultural background, the untrained teachers now face the chop with effect from next year, according to Primary and Secondary Education Minister, Lazarus Dokora.

The Minister, when speaking in Bulawayo last week, said that more 20,000 untrained teachers will face the chop, like heads rolling off the guillotine, following finalisation by the government of the Teachers’ Professional Standards (TPS) as the government moves to improve the quality of education in the country by hiring qualified teachers to replace their untrained counterparts.

In his address at the official opening of Prestige High School in Cowdray Park suburb, the Minister said there was no proper supervision of standards in the education system, resulting in some people “masquerading as teachers when they never went to a teachers’ college”.

But surely, is the public being made to understand here that the 20,000 untrained teachers mentioned are all of them masquerades and, if so, does that not also suggest that the ministry concerned went to sleep and, as a result, was infiltrated by such a large number of untrained teachers?

In fact, was it not that ministry which recruited most of those untrained, temporary teachers to fill in vacancies in some schools, and the same ministry from which the teachers facing wholesale sacking drew their wages?

In the circumstances, should not that ministry’s employees who arranged the employment and wages for the now-ill-fated teachers go away with the latter for helping to dilute educational standards, thereby jeopardising the country’s high literacy rating?

Granted, some of the fly-by-night teachers are to be found in private colleges set up in urban areas by people whose primary objective is apparently not so much to provide quality education to those unable to enter formal school as it is to swell their bank accounts regardless of whether the products churned out are half-cooked to constipate the employment market or not.

Minister Dokora denounced in very strong terms the commercialisation of education through the establishment of private colleges and so it is this pen’s humble opinion that the ministry’s sharp axe should fall first and more heavily on teacher masquerades in private colleges by putting those institutions under constant and rigorous monitoring to ensure that standards are up to scratch in keeping with Zimbabwe’s famed literacy grading in Africa.

This of course also suggests that those who are supposed to ensure that dubious colleges do not rear their ugly heads in society keep their eyes wide open to prevent any such mushrooms seeing the light of day.

As for temporary teachers in government schools, would it not be a measure of the country’s gratefulness to give those civil servants, some of them indefatigable contributors to the growth of education in our nation, some kind of reprieve through a grace period given to them to enter teacher training colleges for purposes of brushing up and topping up their teaching skills as well as all that which makes the teacher a complete professional in the eyes of both the employer and the wider public?

Considering how the genuine and patriotic untrained teachers have helped Zimbabwe scale not just the Inyangani but, more importantly, the Kilimanjaro summit of literacy — while the self-anointed elite, or teaching professionals turned their backs on local schools in dire need of their services by skipping the border in search of so-called greener pastures in neighbouring countries where, ironically, they became the whey while their less educated hosts bossed them as the cream of their native country’s educational system — will it not amount to ingratitude if not outright cruelty or heartlessness, at least in the eyes of some people, for all the untrained teachers in government schools to be given short shrift all at the same time?

And anyway, has the country an equal number of qualified teachers waiting in the wings to fill yawning gaps to be created in schools by the departure of as many as 20,000 teachers, considering, as a matter of fact, the government’s plan to set up cluster schools?

This pen wishes, however, to commend the ministry in point for any and all measures it takes to improve the quality of education in the country and, in that way, keep Zimbabwe on the top most rung of the ladder of literacy in Africa. But this pen believes that a cautious, step by step, rather than a rushed approach to enhancing educational standards, is likely to reap handsome dividends, while the latter approach might make some students with a bent for teaching develop cold feet under a belief that the profession is a no-go area where teachers, albeit untrained ones, are chucked out of the profession as what a farmer does to weeds from a crop field.

But all in all, it remains indisputable that no parent, let alone the country, will ever smile at half-cooked school graduates as such people are not only a case but an impediment to unimpeded social and economic development in Zimbabwe as in any other country on the globe.

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