At a time when standards are plummeting and parents are more and more anguished about the fate of their wards in schools, are schools performing effectively? Or, are there other justifications for the relatively satisfactory performance of certain schools? When l?express features teachers of renown, they all belong to the past. They constitute a heritage never to be revisited. What makes the difference?

Education, then, was a totality of the moral, intellectual, affective and spiritual. Education today has been watered down to its skeletal residue ? textbook, past papers, examinations and a proclivity for mere academic success. The result is that the child is not wholly engaged ? emotionally and intellectually. Dry facts transmitted do not form the substance for educational advancement.

A few children who benefit from a challenging environment at home grasp concepts easily while others who are potentially successful learners need a context, concrete extension of personal experience to comprehend the abstract. How often have we found the average teacher negotiate meaning with his class in an interactive manner, by referring to the personal experience of the learner?

During my inspectorial visits, I saw teachers provide a mass of information that pupils copied undigested. Such teaching alienates the average learner and this could be one of the causes of truancy or absenteeism. Our teachers have not grasped the holistic nature of education and that the child also is a whole. The teacher has truncated the child into an amorphous intellect. My experience as a teacher has tutored me into realizing that, until and unless the child is totally immersed into the multidimensional, almost prismatic nature of a concept, an idea remains alien.

The teacher today lacks the passion for his subject. Without passion there is little capacity for sharing. A teacher is a born sharer. I have known Sookdeo Bissoondoyal who epitomized for me a born sharer, a born teacher, so much so that I once found him carrying copybooks into the National Assembly. Teaching has, over the years, become bureaucratized. Find them protesting against a time-table of 30 periods, working 7th and 8th periods three or more days a week, teaching the text in a parochial manner as if the syllabus was the totality of education.

<I>?We still have excellent teachers. They are unfortunately too few. I do not mean ? good mathematicians, but poor teachers, knowledgeable in literature but incapable of engaging the learner in a constructive experience.?</I>

The pupil who is taught a text of Shakes-peare does not know five other tragedies of the same author. Even the essentials are not conferred. I have followed the class of a teacher teaching Act I Sc ii of Shakespeare?s Winter?s Tale and explaining difficult words in a Verity edition. One is taught Euclid?s theories in Geometry without knowing who he was. The teacher is gradually withering down learning to its minimum that will keep the average pupil to scrape through.

Why do students learn answers by heart? Some teachers capitalize on the avid desire of the learner to obtain marks to sell handouts. Why has overall quality gone down? The difference between that number obtaining grades A and B and that obtaining D and E is alarming. A few are benefitting at the expense of the majority because even in other fields, bureaucracy atrophies and alienates.

Bureaucracy is tantamount to doing the minimum because no discrimination is made between a touch-and-go self-investment and a total immersion in work. Why has the teacher lost his passion for the subject he teaches? A poor grade at HSC, the insufficiency of the work done at tertiary level, and, above all, a mercenary attitude to the profession that makes even the mediocre earn the double of his salary in tuition.

I?ve rarely come across a young person who told me he wants to pursue higher studies because he has a thirst for more knowledge. Does this belong to the realm of the ideal? Many colleagues of mine of the late 60s who went to university have impressed me by a love for what they studied ? law, or medicine.

But worse still, is the fact that the average teacher does not cultivate himself. Ask a graduate of English or Mathematics what has been happening in Darfur. You?ll be astounded by his cultural illiteracy. One of the sources of this incompetence is the school, which lays emphasis on a purely scholastic education. What is learnt at school is cut off from what happens around us.

Education has, in Mauritius, benefited the well-born, the privileged. It?s high time we reflected upon democratising the essence of education. Who is Tagore? Who is Amartya Sen? What were the factors leading to the Second World War? The average Mauritian is an illiterate, a culturally illiterate person, at HSC. We cannot expect a miracle from the graduate who approaches university education like a HSC student dependent on notes.

A cursory glance at many young graduates will reveal that they suffer acutely from a serious lack of maturity. They will befriend the trouble-shooters in their class for their peace and quiet. At times the relationship between teachers and students is so demeaning that it is not surprising a union leader complained about a pupil throwing a bottle of urine on a teacher.

At an induction session at the MIE, I was asked how to behave towards unruly students. I advised the young recruits to observe a code of conduct that allied dignity with fairness and firmness. I was shocked when the young teachers asked me ? ?What does dignity imply?? University education, which has the knack of transforming the student has had no impact on him because he has adopted a pass/fail attitude to his subject.

I would have wished to talk about the vocational training of young graduates even at the risk of irritating my friends at the MIE. I think I shall take the risk. Teaching is mostly learnt in the class when the teacher is observed dealing with situations, assuming the role of facilitator, accessing the mind of the otherwise able learner, showing leadership skills, skills of class management, knowing how to teach through mistakes made by the learner reflecting on his own practice and improving.

It is unfortunate that young teachers joining the MIE do not have the opportunity of being visited often enough to be rated on the basis of practice more than on the basis of learnt theories. MIE has illustrious men and women who have the potential to form cohorts of effective teachers, but its programme is too often based on foreign models excluding the essential elements that make a professional qualification from reliable countries valid, self-sustaining and regenerative.

<I>?Ask an English or Maths graduate what has been happening in Darfur. You?ll be astounded by his cultural illiteracy. One of the sources of this incompetence is the school. What is learnt there is cut off from what happens around us?</I>

Visit the class of an average teacher who has the benefit of 10-15 years of experience. You?ll have the impression this person has never followed a vocational course. Being fit to teach is like being called to bar. Why does the teacher trained at MIE not succeed in transferring what he learnt at the MIE into his class even years after he has left MIE? I have found young teachers with a bare degree perform better than those with a professional qualification. Passion gives a few the possibility of deconstructing themselves to reach graspable meaning.

In our health sector, I have witnessed the existence of supervisory exercise. The Registered Medical Officer (RMO) is trained at work by the specialist, constantly supervised and I have noticed signs of a performance management system (PMS) that makes me feel that, if health was education, there would be a fight for space for graves. This is no reflection on the current state of affairs, but on a sad landscape that has lasted more than two decades.

Every teacher must be supervised by the school leader. Everybody is waiting for a providential performance management system as though it will work wonders. If done efficiently, it will. But there was no PMS in the days of Daniel Koenig, former rector of Sookdeo Bissoondoyal SSS, Prem Burton or even his father, of Georgie Noel. Why can?t our school leaders monitor and advise?

In a previous article, I wrote about the collapse of leadership in schools. I wish that every rector could be the first inspector ?at residence? ? a person who needs not know all subjects, but who has a keen critical awareness of what makes successful or poor teaching. Is it difficult for the rector to check whether every class is being assigned an essay every two weeks?

How can the same teacher mark tuition essays every week? There are schools which give essays just once a term. This is not the product of minister Gokhool?s policies because this is a state of affairs dating as far back as when my son was in Form IV. He is now 28.

Pre-service training is not a one-stop shop where you buy all your victuals for a lifetime. We do not have a rich tradition of in-service training. I have seen this happen in ZEP schools, but not in others. Every training must be followed by an impact evaluation scheme and monitoring for improvement. In fact, Mauritius has no inspectorate worth its name. We need not be polyvalent quality assurance officers who will count loaves in schools, act as postmen for zone directorates and visit classes as though it was a leisure activity. The only group of inspectors the ministry can be happy to have is a group of pedagogical inspectors from the PSSA, now lodged in the ministry.

The pedagogical inspector expects the teachers should have an instructional plan ? a roadmap of the lesson to be taught. Effective teaching comprises explanation, questioning, micropractice, whole-question practice, assessment and self-evaluation. There are multiple variants of an effective lesson. Has the teacher ensured class coverage? What is the participation rate of the different categories of learners? Is there a diversification of methodologies according to the mixity of abilities? How does the teacher ensure independent learning? Does he make an effort to raise the learner from a dependent relationship to an independent learner?s status? Little do people realise that a successful teacher has to do multiple actions at almost the same time.

Because we have not monitored teaching for long, here is a sample of reactions of a few members of our profession:

• ?I am supposed to teach, they are supposed to learn.? (Physics teacher in Form V)

• ?We are teachers, not assessors.? (Union leader)

• ?If they can?t understand, well they are to blame. They just need to have recourse to private tuition.? (I?d like to know the success rate in private tuition among those who fail miserably at school).

I intend to address the private tuition issue in another article. Teachers are human beings who need to be led. Unfortunately our teachers are solitary birds who feel they are falcons in the sky. This article is not meant to debunk colleagues of my tribe. We still have excellent teachers. They are unfortunately too few. I do not mean ? good mathematicians, but poor teachers, knowledgeable in literature but incapable of engaging the learner in a constructive experience. Most of our teachers lack leaders who can help them develop professional attitudes.

Why have 30% of our children consistently failed CPE? Our teachers are mostly good for pupils of average or more than average ability. They fail miserably with ?weak pupils?.

By Santosh Kumar MAHADEO, </B> <I>former director of Curriculum, Ministry of Education</I>