An Education Specialist, Smith Bam has stated that to battle the challenge of low enrollment in the teaching profession, the Federal Government must elevate teachers’ salary to be at par with that of the medical doctors’.
Bam stated this while presenting a paper on ‘Practical approach to Teacher Education: Challenges of Low Students Enrollment in Tertiary Institutions in Nigeria’ during an Education Correspondence Association of Nigeria (ECAN) Workshop in Abuja.
The educationist stated that the teaching profession has been denigrated to the extent that even students who are being taught by teachers had sworn not to be like them.
Advertisement
Bam noted that as long as students do not find role models in the teachers, enrolment will continue to be low.
“The challenge about the profession didn’t start today. I left the University in 1999 and I will tell you that way back then, no ‘sensible’ person went into education and that was before internet fraud and the iPhone. No student will sit down and fill their JAMB form and their first choice will be teaching.
“This issue of low enrollment is as old as education itself. What is new is the volume. I have been working with teachers for about 24 years. I have met passionate teachers who are looking for something better. For them, it is a regret being a teacher. The average teacher finds teaching as a misfortune,” he lamented.
He added there was a need to increase the yardstick for being a teacher, noting that though the Teachers Registration Council of Nigeria(TRCN) is doing its best in making sure that the perimeters of teaching is high, it will not work when the compensation for teachers is still low.
Bam also spoke on the need for the curriculum of the teaching profession to be revamped so that teachers will be updated to happenings in the 21st century.
“We need to destroy the archaic curriculum. Teachers graduate and they are 20 years behind. The materials used to teach are obsolete and archaic and you have people who have first class degrees that are useless.
“If you pick up the social studies text book in our schools, we as teachers are having problems using it to teach because you will see in the book where they say, ‘mothers carrying firewood’. How do you explain to children in Maitama that a mother’s role is to carry firewood? It is still in the textbook as of today. We tell children that their father is the breadwinner and in reality, it is the mother that is the breadwinner. Our students are wrestling with reality because the curriculum doesn’t make sense,” he said.
He noted that even school inspectors whose responsibility is to ensure that the standard of education in Nigerian schools remains top notch, are still backward in their ways of doing things.
“ When inspectors come to our schools, they pull us back to the dark ages. Inspectors will ask for our lesson plans and when we open our laptops to show them, they will say that they want the hard copy. In 2024? How do you inspect what you are not proficient at?,” he queried.