Our teachers deserve better

Editor, Reference is made to your Editorial, “Teacher motivation: The private sector too can chip in” (The New Times, April 16). When I was still teaching many adults from Asian countries, I was often told that in China and in other countries under Chinese socio-cultural influence, priority in esteem and reverence goes to ancestors first, then to one’s parents, and third, to teachers ... like me. In reference to the third most valued position in the Chinese cultural sphere, that of a teacher, in our traditional Rwanda social context, we didn’t have any sort of formal teaching, teaching position, nor a special teaching social status. Every elder was a teacher in respective given circumstances. Anyone ‘who has seen sunrise before, has seen many things that she/he can share with newborns’. That is how any elder was naturally imparted with the role of a teacher, and some more pedagogical were remembered and even revered for life, and socially immortalised through several socio-cultural manifestations. That was our traditional concept and daily practice of the worth of a teacher. Before this latter’s social role, position, and core contribution were debased through western ‘modernity’. And I am afraid, even with tucking into teachers’ pockets more monetary contributions from all sorts of direct and indirect taxes, this will not re-establish our teachers’ social worth and their invaluable contribution to our collective well being. Perhaps, prior to mere monetary considerations, we collectively as a society ought to re-think first and then establish an actualised role and social status of the kind of teachers we need for our ‘continuing to be’. We must decide first if we want our teachers either to continue to be low-based - therefore low paid - agents of our acculturation into mere workers and consumers at the world market place - into which, by the way, we Africans are not valued that high -; or instead, if we want our teachers to somehow resume their traditional role of agents in constituting us as a people with a certain individual and collective total ‘value added’, both at home and at the international scene. Francois-Xavier Nziyonsenga

Opinions

Our teachers deserve better