New Thinking, Teaching and Training with Old Books, Bags and Backpacks…

TODAY, October 5, is World Teachers Day, which, in 2022, is different to all celebrated since the United Nations and UNESCO first dedicated it in 1994.

This year’s theme is ‘The Transformation of Education Begins with Teachers’ – and (once again) it’s an effort to embrace one that teachers everywhere can relate to.

But the theme is only a reminder of the obvious, which no teacher can forget, far less ignore, as this is their vocation – to teach and educate.

While observing today in different ways, Caribbean teachers everywhere should take some time-off to reflect on the fact that some are being called upon to, or are actually supporting, depriving students of their inalienable and protected rights to continuing education – just because they wear ‘dreadlocks’ hairstyles — even with parents’ blessings…

Antigua & Barbuda and Saint Lucia were in the news last month after church-run schools refused to allow students entry, on the first day of classes, because of their hair.

But this cannot look or sound normal in the eyes of the rest of the Caribbean and the world today, when parents have to hire lawyers and hurry to courts to get their children to enter the very same schools attended last school year.

I insist that outdated rules will always be broken – and any private or religious school rule that bans any child from an education, simply because of how they look, is not just outdated but simply unjust and has no place in today’s society.

This situation alone is still challenging enough to ignite intelligent conversations and debates across the region – especially, but not only, among teachers — about such ideas that would fundamentally affect students; and to urge them to ask the education planners to treat it as a matter that has to do with the rights of students to an education, instead of the rights of principals of non-public schools to decide what happens under their roofs.

Teachers do lead the way in transforming education, but students and parents have as much stake in ensuring development of appropriate curricula and approaches that change with and adapt to changing times, unlike the old and continuing system that ties our children’s education to textbooks by traditional colonial international publishers.

In many cases regionally, principals can unilaterally change to new textbooks for old subjects, making it more difficult for students whose parents can’t afford new books to inherit, purchase or swap old ones.

I was as taken aback as most who saw it when, on the second day of school, a distraught Saint Lucian parent complained of having to go to the Ministry of Education for answers because she’d purchased the correct textbook — as stated on the booklist supplied — only to be told on the first day of school that she’d bought ‘the wrong book…’

The complaining mother wanted to know who would refund her — and I was wondering how many other parents of students in that same class, other classes, or other schools, could have had the same problem – and if the same wasn’t also happening elsewhere in the region…

This was the first year since COVID-19 in 2020 that students and teachers returned to class ‘In Person’ and without masks, no more Online Classes or parents complaining about effects on their jobs and students complaining about missing teachers and friends, mothers accompanying their children to the school, by tradition, to get to know their child’s teacher, among other reasons.

The first school day today is still very much like it’s always been: students attending with new uniforms, shoes, books, bags and back-packs, anxious to make new friends, hoping for a ‘good teacher’ and looking forward to another year in class – and in many cases too, looking forward to one year less of having to study the same ‘boring’ subjects and doing the same things over-and-over-again, every school day…

Today’s teachers and principals everywhere have a challenge of leading the way in transforming the education system — by working with Education Ministries to make schooling more attractive and education more desirable than having to undertake as routine.

Guyana has the GOAL and the Cyril Potter College of Education is now online many cases, but in too many cases across the region, while the advent of Science and Technology and Information Technology (IT) revolutions have made learning easier, that’s only for those who can and are ready to engage with the new devices and the changing apps.

Teachers and parents tend to differ, by generation mainly, in their interpretation of and relation to the changes involving introduction of IT to schooling; and students are able to keep-up with all the changes better than teachers and parents, but the evolution into their thinking, teaching and learning is not equally measured.

And that’s why I have a problem with the return of the age-old ‘hair’ issue, which is, again, exclusive to private and religious schools that make and enforce their own schools, outside of the public education system, refusing to accept students with Rastafari hairstyles – as if they threaten students’ and teachers’ health.

The return of the hair issue in Antigua & Barbuda and Saint Lucia – mainly affecting children of African descent — exposes the continued existence of outdated laws in the education system alongside curricula that haven’t gone far, 60 years into independence, to root Caribbean teachers and students in true Caribbean history.

At a time when History is an endangered subject in the Caribbean school system from tertiary to university levels, it’s necessary for teachers to take a forward step and continue leading the way in the transformation of education by not leaving the resolution of this hair issue to the schools and education officials only, but to discuss locally and exchange regionally, preferably through the Caribbean Union of Teachers.

Just a thought for consideration on International Teachers Day – and beyond.