One of the reasons behind failure among students coming from disadvantaged backgrounds is their inability to project themselves into the future to foresee the benefits of education. People tend to be motivated by rewards. Hence, if they are not inspired by the rewarding aspects of learning, students will lose interest in this activity.

Children coming from poor families rarely find inspiration in their environment, therefore their teachers have the doubly incumbent, challenging and rewarding responsibility of making them dream of the fruits they can harvest from the fields of knowledge. While black history month has just been celebrated, it’s worth praising the exceptional techniques of vision setting used by the great educator in peaceful resistance against segregation, Dr Martin Luther King .

Almost all his speeches are geared by a vision of hope and happiness. Did he not in the midst of the segregation nightmare, teach people how to “dream” of an America where sons of former slaves and sons of former slave owners would “sit down together at the table of brotherhood”? Did he not talk about the promised land he saw from the “mountain top” in a speech he made on the eve of his assassination?

Behind successful students coming from the barren land of poverty, there are often dedicated teachers who successfully manage to encourage them to believe in the promised land of education. They would, for instance, tell them real stories of people who triumphed over their conditions through education. Was education not the key which was to open the prime ministerial door to a little boy called Seewoosagaur?

It is of course not an easy task to make disadvantaged children dream of the long-term benefits of education especially when parents do not promote the vision, being blinded by the obscurity of misery and its allies.

Yet, it shows the true measure of a teacher who may draw much more satisfaction from inspiring children from unfavourable backgrounds, than working with well-heeled elites who, from the cradle, are fed with the positive outcomes of education.

Teaching is more a vocation than a profession and this can be seen when educators of poverty-stricken children, most of them found in low-performing schools, take their jobs to heart and put all their efforts into breaking the vicious seal of a visionless fate. Let’s encourage those teachers in their endeavour by recognizing their incommensurable worth.

A primary school teacher who manages to save his pupils from failing their CPE is as praiseworthy as his star-school colleague who produces a laureate elite, whose aim in many cases is to leave the country… !

<B>Alain JEANNOT</B>