Of teaching and quality education
Issues about teachers in Malawi hardly miss the headlines in the local media. If it is not about low and delayed payments or inadequate resources then you are assured that it will concern ‘indecent acts’ between teachers and pupils. Such issues are happening amid the public demand for improved quality of education.
Much as the public may be justified in their demands, there are a lot more issues to be resolved before their demands are met. For a start, our education set-up is loose in its definition of teachers. There is a problem in defining who a teacher is in Malawi. In professions such as law, medicine and nursing, it is easy to tell who their professionals are, through their respective councils. In these professions, it is their particular councils that certify candidates before they become practising professionals.
However, in the absence of a council in the teaching ‘profession’, it becomes difficult to tell who a teacher really is. This has made the public believe that a teacher is anyone who stands in front of a class with a teacher’s guide, regardless of their qualification.
In principle, students who successfully complete education training are given a certificate called ‘authority to teach’ by the Teaching Service Commission. However, the value that this certificate has, and the procedure for its issuance are yet to be established as over three quarters of the country’s qualified teachers do not possess this paper. Again, it is not clear whether this certificate stands in the place of a council’s certification. This may prove difficult in the quest for quality education as the government itself has not visibly delineated appropriate qualities for teachers.
Another thing that exposes weaknesses in the management of teachers is the way the Teachers Union of Malawi (TUM) operates. It is quite difficult to define the mandate and the scope within which TUM operates. Whatever defines teachers in Malawi, it is common knowledge that they are widely spread across public and private schools. Surprisingly, TUM has reservedly come to recognise only the former. This is evident in the way TUM gets monthly membership fees. The union gets monthly membership fees from teachers in public schools without mutual consent. This gives an impression of forced membership. If collection of such money is done in good faith, then why not proceed to do the same with teachers in private schools? Or does it mean that TUM is a union for public school teachers alone? Then why not be specific?
Paradoxically, when it comes to fighting for the cause of teachers, TUM hardly appears in the frontline. This has, consequently, left many teachers hopeless and discontented to the extent that they fail to deliver the best of their performance. This, too, hinders the attainment of quality education.
Again, the teaching profession has itself to blame for low quality of education because of eminent divisions among the personnel. If there are departments in Malawi that have divided minds, then education tops the list. Ever since the missionaries introduced formal education in Malawi, teachers have been involved in self-help ambitions and they have hardly been bound for a common cause. To prove this claim, just look at how silent many teachers, including the union, have remained amid the Ministry of Education’s decision to ‘sideline’ teachers of humanities in issues of upgrading and promotion.
Instead of science and language teachers openly disagreeing with this move, they have sat back watching the issue unfold, perhaps clapping their hands in agreement knowing they will rise several steps against their colleagues. This is against the philosophy of many classical educationists who believed in unity of purpose among educationists as a milestone in promotion of education quality. They contend that cooperation among teachers was a capstone for invention of new knowledge that no individual teacher could afford to discover.
There is need to harmonise these divergent interests and ambitions before quality education in Malawi is realised.
