By Dr. Raphael Ogar Oko
The education of children all over the world has remained a critical challenge and the major task of educators. In broad terms, educators involve parents in the family, teachers in the school and leaders in the community. However, among the three core educators, namely, parents, teachers and leaders, it is only teachers who are professionally trained as educators and this has made many people focus on schooling as the main way of seeking to be educated.
Consequently, children in families are admitted in schools as students and grow to become citizens in their communities. It is the mission of teachers to teach students who were born as children and who will become citizens of the community.
The main work of a teacher is to make someone to learn. Teaching is one of the means to achieving the task of making someone to learn. The work of a teacher is to inspire, empower and connect learners to resources and tools that will facilitate learning. When students fail to learn, it implies that the teacher was unable to do enough to make the student to learn and it is a situation that we as teachers need to repent about.
Teachers stand in the midway position between the parents in the family and the leaders of the community. Without teachers, the children born by parents cannot become the desired citizens that leaders in the community are praying for. For this reason, teachers need to teach with the heart of parents and with the hands of leaders so that they can make students to learn.
No teacher should be happy for the failure of his/her students but should shed tears for failing to inspire, empower and connect students to learn. As facilitators of learning, we are responsible for showing students how to utilize their knowledge and skills and we need innovative approaches to celebrate the commitment, dedication and accomplishments of learners in order to motivate them to learn and seek to learn again and again.
The central place where organized teaching and learning takes place is the classroom, which is the most central and holy room in the school. All other rooms in a school exist to provide support for the classroom and teaching and learning is the main activity. Like a holy temple, we must have teachers who are well prepared to enter the classroom. It is not a place for people seeking revenge against learners, nor should drunkards, traders of grades, false reporters of scores by authorized to enter such a holy room where citizens are being made. Such is the importance of a teacher and the classroom
While taking responsibility to facilitate learning, teachers are confronted with several challenges that tend to make them ineffective.
The non-complementary roles of parents and leaders prevent teachers from achieving their mandates. One of the major burdens of inheritance that teachers have to deal with is the quality and quantity of children being produced by the parents in the families that are handed over to the teachers to refine in the schools. Even though born by parents after 3 trimesters in the womb, most children lack the capacity to be admitted to schools and to be taught by teachers.
The quality of family level parenting during life in the womb and from day to birth to school age is so poor that most children carry over so many home nursery courses to schools. The quantity of qualified parents who should give birth is very little but everyone who is sexually active is producing and reproducing unqualified children for teachers to teach. If we must improve learning in schools and make teaching easier for teachers, there is the need to look into the education of potential and present parents in order to make them professionally competent for parenting to ease teaching.
I believe that most parents need to be re-trained and this is why a parenting mastery course for parents can help teachers in their work. In addition, after the bachelor/spinster degrees, those who intend to create families should undergo a couple degree programs instead of master’s degree and a parent degree instead of the present PhD. For teachers, since most parents were not professionally trained before giving birth to children who seek to become students and who we must make great citizens, we need to take responsibility and combine our teaching role with parenting duty.
Without doubt, most children were not educationally ‘born well’ but we have no option than to admit them into schools for refining. We must become second tier parents who can offer opportunities for wrongly born children to be ‘born again’ in the schools. While working for better parents in the future, we need to offer rebirth to the present generation of children to make them learn through our teaching.
It is this special ability of teachers that makes many parents to handover their children to one teacher as students making teachers to be higher parents. Most parents do not have more than 12 children made from their bedrooms but as teachers, we have children from about 40 families that we make to learn in our classrooms. So, teachers are higher parents remedying the deficiencies of family parents and preparing citizens for community leaders. We need to know this clearly
if the desire to create access to education for all will bring desired outcomes of a peaceful and healthy society. While teachers have the main task of ensuring that students are able to learn, parents need to fulfil their own portion of responsibility in raising children with the potential to cultivate the right attitude, knowledge and skills for useful living in the society.
