Rejuvenating Teaching As A Profession

Teaching, which hitherto was a lucrative and respectable job, was thrown to the dogs on the discovery of oil in the 70s. Young people preferred white collar jobs to classroom, thereby making the number one profession a neglected one. MARTIN PAUL writes that the proposed summit on teachers will revive the thinking towards teaching.

At the presentation of the 2014 score card of the Federal Ministry of Education, last December, the Minister of Education, Malam Ibrahim Shekarau, stated unequivocally that a national summit on teachers was inevitable.

He ascribed that his tenure that would, tentatively, elapsed by May 2015, would address the challenge of quality teachers in Nigerian schools and would endeavour to identity ways of attracting best brains into the profession.
It is certain that the teaching profession has suffered a tremendous set back over the years and that is why Shekarau’s stance, unabatedly, attracts a critique into the growth of teacher education in the country.
It could be recalled that the early missionaries brought the western education into Nigeria and Africa as a whole and also domineered the teaching professions.

Only a few Nigerians, who were proved worthy or had performed creditably, well at their basic school examinations, were given opportunities of teaching, at least at the lower levels.
The quest for developing Nigerians to become teachers heightened and culminated to the establishment of Teacher Training Colleges (TTC) all over the country.
Thereafter, the Teacher Training Colleges were abolished and replaced with Colleges of Education with rights of ownership granted to, not only the federal government, but states and private individuals.

Today, besides universities offering education as a course, Nigeria can aptly boost of colleges of education at federal, states and private ownership levels, spread across the 36 states of the federation and the Federal Capital Territory, giving teacher training to teeming number of those who desire it.

The twin saying that no nation can rise above the level of its education and no education can grow beyond the level of its teacher, has come to interplay in the governance of the country, which is why the need for training and re-training of teachers is imperative.
According to Shekarau, training and capacity development has been a key focus because of the need to ensure that teachers and other education personnel continue to develop the competence to be effective in the performance of their duties.

Consequently, over 649,268 basic education teachers have been trained at various levels, while 9, 000 were at the tertiary at masters’ and doctorate levels.
Again, Shekarau underscores to need for these training programmes when he presented the report on “Consolidating the transformation in the education sector”.

He stated, categorically, that progress has been made through the revision of the teacher education curriculum and this has been restructured so that the National Certificate on Education (NCE) students would now focus on early childhood care education, primary education studies, junior secondary, adult and non-formal as well as special needs education.

With a view to moving away from analogue teaching, which has been the bane of teaching in many schools, micro-teaching laboratories are being constructed in the 58 federal and state colleges of education.
It is expected that the proposed summit on teachers, which would centre on training, recruitment, retention and career paths, would rekindle the old belief that many young Nigerians were not interested in becoming teachers because of poor remunerations and condition of service.

Implementing the recommendation of the summit, the need assessment of colleges of education, teacher education curriculum, granting of special incentives to specialised scheme, such as Mathematics, English and Social Sciences would, undoubtedly, attract young people to the teaching profession.

Above all, Nigeria as a nation that emphasise on paper qualification, should ensure that the introduction B.Ed in colleges of education is followed to the later.
It is, therefore, heart-warming to note that of the 649,628 trained teachers, every state participated from the exercise, which started since 2010 through 2013.
The Universal Basic Education Commission (UBEC) available statistics shows that Abia state has 16, 476 trained teachers in since 2010, while Adamawa has 15, 940.

Akwa Ibom, according to the statistics, has 16,091, Anambra, 14,306 Bauchi, 13,808, while Bayelsa has 14, 246 trained teachers, followed by Benue with 14,476 and Borno with 15,185.
Cross river state has recorded 23, 349 trained teachers, Delta 14, 574, Ebonyi 15, 356, followed by 16, 817, Ekiti 15, 029 and Enugu and Gombe with 13, 318 and 14, 921 trained teachers, respectively.
As at 2013, Imo state recoded 15, 124 trained teachers in the covers of UBEC, followed by Jigawa with 31, 999 and Kaduna with 29, 991 as well as Kano with 36, 210 trained teachers.

Katsina state has 15, 225 of its teachers trained, Kebbi has 13, 319 and followed by 15, 785 and Kwara 15, 922 even as Lagos, Nasarawa and Niger have 21,943; 15,539 and 22,593, trained teachers, respectively.
UBEC’s statistics also showed that Ogun, Ondo, Osun and Oyo states had 14, 044; 16,038; 15, 870 and 17, 295 trained teachers, respectively, while Plateau and Rivers have 29, 744 and 13, 752 trained teachers.
In Sokoto, 16, 916teachers have been trained, 12, 453 in Taraba and 17, 092 in Yobe, while 14, 983 were trained in Zamfara and 14, 139 in the Federal Capital Territory (FCT).

The statistics further revealed that Kano recorded the highest number of trained teachers, followed by Jigawa, while Plateau came third with the list number of trained teachers coming from Taraba state.

Shekarau further noted that despite the recognition of the importance teachers, there is still the problem of attracting and retaining quality teachers in the system.
“It is in the light of this, that the proposed national summit on teachers is imperative because teacher quality in education is critical to the long-term future of this country”, he said.

Acceptably, quality of teachers has fallen, thus leading to challenges of attracting best brains back into the system. This is why the summit is hoped at providing a coordinated policy to address the challenges of teacher development, recruitment and retention.
Other thematic areas would be on re-positioning of the profession for quality outcome and attraction, pre-service and in-service training, teacher demand and supply, salaries and conditions of service.