‘Teachers must help fix sick education system’
Naptosa head Dr Anthea Cereseto told the union’s KZN conference that teachers had to help diagnose problems in the education system andd provide remedies.
|||Durban - If the education system was sick or failing to deliver as it should, it was up to teachers to help diagnose the root of the problem and provide the remedy.
These were the words of National Professional Teachers' Organisation of SA (Naptosa) president, Dr Anthea Cereseto, at the union's KwaZulu-Natal elective congress held in Durban on Thursday.
Addressing 400 union delegates and speaking on the theme, "Is the system ailing?", Cereseto said teachers were the system.
"Who is the system? Is it the Department of Basic Education, is it the KZN Department of Education, districts, schools, classrooms or society entirely?
"Each one of us is the education system. I am ailing, sick, unsuccessful, weak - it is more difficult when you put yourself in the system," she said.
"We must identify what is making the system sick," she said.
Cereseto said blaming pupils was an "easy cop out" and called for teachers to take responsibility for the diminishing levels of education.
"If you as a teacher feel sick, look for the causes in your spheres of operation. A sick system means we need to be professional activists involved in a struggle," she said.
Cereseto, who retires next year, urged teachers to never cap the aspirations of pupils.
"Give hope and faith to these children. When you are a teacher there must be a trust between teacher and learner.
"The biggest crime is speaking negatively to the learners, demotivating them, we must tell them to go for level 7 (A symbols)," she said.
Basil Manuel, director and former Naptosa president, urged the department to stop being fixated with over assessing of pupils and said there would be no Annual National Assessments (ANA) this year. Naptosa is proposing a revised ANA to be written every two or four years.
He said the union supported the department's Operation Bounce Back campaign, which aims to improve the matric pass rate by 10% this year.
He said some matric maths teachers had not been trained in Euclidean geometry and said this was an area of concern in the lead-up to the exams in October.
Manuel said training offered by universities needed to be reviewed because it was not giving the desired results.
Asked if Naptosa supported calls for the reopening of teacher training colleges, he said: "We need the model that the colleges used because the universities are too academic, there is not enough practical training. But the answer is not to recreate training colleges."
sihle.mlambo@inl.co.za
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