On our back page today, we carry the lament of the Parliamentary Select Committee on Education whose chairman has diagnosed the decline in education standards in the country as “the over-concentration of qualified teachers in the urban areas.
“Many teachers, mostly qualified university graduates, do not want to accept postings to rural areas since amenities such as potable water, electricity and accommodation are lacking,” he said. That, he added, “leaves only pupil teachers or no teachers at all in those areas”.
The committee is right.
There is a clear and present discomfort to a teacher who has spent all his life in a city, settling in an area whose drinking water source is the stream; whose only source of light at night is the moonlight and where accommodation means an old dilapidated mud-house which could cave in at the next rainy season.
We can only hope that with this diagnosis, the parliamentarians would bring pressure to bear on the powers-that-be, both in the Executive and the Legislature, to implement the very suggestions that the chairman has made through his interview with the GNA, namely that government expedite action on its rural electrification programme, pending which there should be solar lamps for such professionals who either opt to teach or find themselves teaching in rural areas.
Thinking aloud, the Times wonders when the long promised incentive for teachers who opt to teach in rural areas will ever be implemented.
Huge publicity should be mounted by the government to make this package known when implementation starts to entice urban-bound teachers to these deprived areas.
Meanwhile, on our Education Page today (page 15) a rather disturbing trend is reported in Bokorkorkpe in the Shama district of the Western Region, where the chief and his elders are said to be scaring away female teachers from the area.
The female teachers are scared because of “the persistent amorous advances made by the chief and his elders toward them,” according to the District Director of Education.
He complained that “instead of assisting the female teachers to settle comfortably in the community (the chief and his elders) continue to propose love to them, and those who refuse your advances are constantly harassed”.
What a sad story! It is sad because invariably, in many rural communities, the chiefs and their powerful elders have their way.
The newly qualified female teacher who has not been paid for upwards of six months is likely to fall prey to the lecherous greed of powerful forces in the community who are lords over everything they survey.
Besides their vulnerability brought on by their helpless condition resulting from delayed salaries, the female teacher, fresh from school, may be too young to marry.
Without a life partner, lonely and helplessly broke, they are common fodder for any male with enough power as the chiefs and elders wield.
That is why the Times, while commending the District Education Director for exposing the criminal and predatorial sexual pranks of the chiefs and elders, must take the next, and very important, step of having them arrested the next time any such complaints get to his notice.
The law must protect these endangered species – the patriotic female teachers – from the diabolical advances of dirty minds.
“Many teachers, mostly qualified university graduates, do not want to accept postings to rural areas since amenities such as potable water, electricity and accommodation are lacking,” he said. That, he added, “leaves only pupil teachers or no teachers at all in those areas”.
The committee is right.
There is a clear and present discomfort to a teacher who has spent all his life in a city, settling in an area whose drinking water source is the stream; whose only source of light at night is the moonlight and where accommodation means an old dilapidated mud-house which could cave in at the next rainy season.
We can only hope that with this diagnosis, the parliamentarians would bring pressure to bear on the powers-that-be, both in the Executive and the Legislature, to implement the very suggestions that the chairman has made through his interview with the GNA, namely that government expedite action on its rural electrification programme, pending which there should be solar lamps for such professionals who either opt to teach or find themselves teaching in rural areas.
Thinking aloud, the Times wonders when the long promised incentive for teachers who opt to teach in rural areas will ever be implemented.
Huge publicity should be mounted by the government to make this package known when implementation starts to entice urban-bound teachers to these deprived areas.
Meanwhile, on our Education Page today (page 15) a rather disturbing trend is reported in Bokorkorkpe in the Shama district of the Western Region, where the chief and his elders are said to be scaring away female teachers from the area.
The female teachers are scared because of “the persistent amorous advances made by the chief and his elders toward them,” according to the District Director of Education.
He complained that “instead of assisting the female teachers to settle comfortably in the community (the chief and his elders) continue to propose love to them, and those who refuse your advances are constantly harassed”.
What a sad story! It is sad because invariably, in many rural communities, the chiefs and their powerful elders have their way.
The newly qualified female teacher who has not been paid for upwards of six months is likely to fall prey to the lecherous greed of powerful forces in the community who are lords over everything they survey.
Besides their vulnerability brought on by their helpless condition resulting from delayed salaries, the female teacher, fresh from school, may be too young to marry.
Without a life partner, lonely and helplessly broke, they are common fodder for any male with enough power as the chiefs and elders wield.
That is why the Times, while commending the District Education Director for exposing the criminal and predatorial sexual pranks of the chiefs and elders, must take the next, and very important, step of having them arrested the next time any such complaints get to his notice.
The law must protect these endangered species – the patriotic female teachers – from the diabolical advances of dirty minds.
