India (Commonwealth Union) – There has been a tidal wave across Asia with regard to the number of school teachers and educators being difficult to hire and then once hired to retain in their jobs. This has not just been in Asia but all around the world. Nevertheless, the topic today is Asian education and therefore we discuss the problem of school teachers in the Asian regions.
When it comes to education, as a parent you would want to make sure that your child gets the best the world has to offer and if not the world, then at least the best your country has to offer. Now most Asian countries have brilliant tertiary education plans but of course before one goes to university they have to get through their elementary, middle and high school education.
There are options of government, semi government and private school for all ages. In the Asian region however unlike the European and American regions they do not sperate the schooling system into three levels before the children go off to university. Usually in South Asian countries children will enter grade one at 5 years old and go through the same school till they are 18 and write their final exam which will then help them with their futures plans of collage.
Most South Asian school offer the option of it being an only male or only female option schools in case of cultural or religious sensitivity. It really depends on the parents as to how they want to educate their child. Now we come to the actual issue at hand; the educators. There is a definite discrepancy in pay slips when it comes to government school teachers and non- or semi-governmental school teachers. The wage gap is a massive one.
Apart from the wages its also things like work life balance. Teachers of the governmental sect have a lot more responsibility than teachers of the non- or semi-governmental sector and sometimes this shows clearly. In government schools because the fee is very nominal almost everybody can afford to put their children there which means classrooms have more students than a teacher can handle. Meanwhile, a private or semi-governmental is not so bad; semi-governmental school would still have less than a government school but more than a private school. One would find the perfect balance in the private schools as the fees are high which means that the private school caters to the children exclusively and they don’t crowd classrooms to the point where the teacher is stressed out.
However, this is just one small drop of a problem in an ocean of crumbling educational problems. It all starts with the different expectations from the different types of teachers. To start with, when one is an educator in the public or government sector then the expectations are very different. You are expected to educate up to 40 children a day most times juggling more than one subject. You are then expected to make sure these children pass through each year with respectable attendance and mark so that there is no one left behind. If the children by some chance underperform and don’t make it then the teacher is supposed to sit there and take the blame from the parents not given a chance to explain why what happened has happened.
This is the kind of pressure that private school teachers or semi-governmental teachers would not have to bear. Semi-governmental students may have a little pressure as the salary of a semi-governmental teacher is paid by the education ministry and then private sector. This means that whilst they do have a responsibility to take on governmental tasks regarding education, which is government exams duty as invigilators and things such as paper marking. Now they do not have to do as much as a government teacher but this is still a lot more work than a private sector teacher would have to do.
Now the thing is because of this a lot of teachers don’t want to stay in the government sector. It’s a mutual feeling that they feel they are not sufficiently compensated for the amount of work they do. To be realistic a government pay is barely anything. There are of course the perks of having late retirement and pensions and even insurance, but those are also now offered by semi-governmental and private institutions on top of very good pay scales. This can only mean that there is more teachers who want to join the private sector than continue in the government sector.
Most often than not all teachers coming out of training have to do a certain time of teaching in a public school. So, a young teacher will enter a public school with the hopes of staying and making a change, but these views change once the training time is done, they realize that there is more responsibility and not enough salary. This only means that they will hang in there till a better opportunity comes along in the private schooling sector and they will leave.
This can be curbed and stopped by the governments of Asian countries if the education ministries gave the teachers of the government sector a better pay and a little less of a work load. This could mean that the young teachers that come around would not leave as soon as they get the chance. The children that go to government run institutions should ideally receive the same educational opportunities that a child who does not go to a governmental institution. But of course, this all depends on the teaching staff.
The teachers need to be given some type of renumeration that is worthy of the time they have dedicated to the class room. All teachers have the same type of qualification the reason that teachers in the government sector are not given a renumeration as high as the teachers in the private sector is because sometimes there isn’t the funds to do so. However, the education sector in the government needs to make sure that the public sector teachers are taken care of in order to retain them in their current jobs.
The public sector needs to start making needed changes if they are to retain a younger generation of teachers where they have new knowledge and somewhat better training. The vicious cycle of the younger generation of teachers only training in government schools and leaving for private sector schools has to end. Nevertheless, that is a big change. It is not impossible and one must start somewhere.
