Resumo

BECKMANN, Johan. The necessity of competent teachers in each South African school classroom. Tydskr. geesteswet. [online]. 2021, vol.61, n.3, pp.753-771. ISSN 2224-7912.  http://dx.doi.org/10.17159/2224-7912/2021/v61n3a7.

The South African government's relatively high spending on education is not reflected in die quality of educators and education. The inadequate quality of education can to a large degree be attributed to the poor quality of South African educators. In this article I will briefly sketch the poor performance of the education system as measured by agencies like the World Economic Forum and evaluated in international studies with reference to matters such as literacy and mathematics teaching. This is an attempt to make sense of some existing and emerging reasons why the presence of competent educators in classrooms may be non-negotiable to provide improved and adequate education. The reasons apply to the present and the future when education will be in a space completely different from the present due to the COVID-19 pandemic. I will explore questions about what a competent teacher is, why so many South African teachers are incompetent, whether we can define the value of teachers in terms of more than vague and sentimental praises for educators' work, the challenges COVID-19 poses which are lkely to render incompetent teachers uanable to respond effectively and the challenges and opportunities that the post-pandemic epoch will entail. In trying to define what a competent teacher is, I first consulted the Department of Education's Norms and Standards for Educators document of 2000 which defines seven roles that educators have to play. I believe that this document does not adequately define what a competent educator is in our current situation as it was primarily developed to support the Outcomes-Based Education teacher education initiative around 2000. Furthermore, present compliance theory approaches to education management limit the autonomy a teacher needs to fulfil these seven roles. Spaull (2013) believes a competent educator should display a minmum level of professionalism including a real desire to teach. I agree with his four characteristics of teacher professionalism. Even taken together with the seven roles they still do not capture all the qualities a competent educator should possess and I added some perspectives from education law and pedagogical theory to augment their definitions. I referred to capabilities of competent teachers such as creating the future for the learners in their care, protecting learners' sexual and overall safety and creating a relationship of trust with learners and the entire education community to lead children to maturity in enabling them to shoulder their responsibility for the welfare of society. Competent educators should also be capable of responding quickly and effectively to new and unexpected challenges. The main aim of this article is not to identify the reasons why so many teachers are incompetent. I did, however, refer to some aspects that policy makers and leaders and managers should address to improve the quality of teachers. These include concerns about the quality of teachers' initial and further training programmes, the legacy of apartheid which provided most teachers with inadequate teacher training, the poor state of teacher induction, appointment processes that go wrong for various reasons and, lastly, the unsatisfactory conditions of service of educators in regard to which Mbiza (2021) makes a statement that rings true and addresses two problem areas simultaneously: "Yes, let's pay teachers more, but let's also raise the entry-level requirements for the profession". Next I considered the value of competent teachers and was surprised that many eminent scholars like Hanushek (2011) and Hattie (2002) as well as Martinez (2015) and Kristof (2012) agreed that one cannot really measure the value of educators or clothe it in slogans aimed to make teachers feel good. They all agreed that the solution to problems in education does not lie in policy initiatives and strategies like limiting the number of learners per teachers, the provision of artificial intelligence and cyber hardware to schools and statistical analyses of schools' performances. Instead, they all found that the best way to address educational challenges was to ensure that in every classroom there was a teacher of at least average competence (not even a good or excellent teacher) and that poor teachers should be removed from classrooms - the obvious question here is how that can be done while respecting the labour and other rights of teachers. However, what was most surprising is that they discovered that they were able to develop "more prosaic economic values related to effective teaching, by drawing on research literature that provides surprisingly precise estimates of the impact of student achievement levels on their lifetime earnings" (Hanushek 2011). They were even able to calculate and articulate the impact of better than poor educators on a country's economy. I then turned to the implications of COVID-19 for educators and used the NIDS-CRAM fifth wave review of the pandemic for indications of areas that will require the involvement of competent teachers. These areas include the tripling of learner drop-outs, the increase in learners' suffering from "silent" and other forms of hunger and the problem of stunting caused by hunger and malnutrition. I commented on the loss of teaching time of between 70% and 100% of primary school learners. However, educational managers and leaders and teachers now have an opportunity and duty to use special skills to find more ways of involving the community in addressing these problems. An attempt to imagine the situation after the pandemic led me to study the work of Schwab and Malleret (2020). They adduced that the post-pandemic world would be totally different from the pre-pandemic one. They did not provide any concrete guidelines but argued convincingly that the complexity, interdependence and velocity of hitherto unknown societal changes and the acceleration of some present phenomena will present competent educators with more challenges than ever before. However, there will also be opportunities to "reset" or reimagine a new education dispensation. The need for competent educators will become even more acute than it is now and will be non-negotiable.

Palavras-chave : corona virus implications; financial implications; immeasurable value of teachers' contributions; non-negotiability; system reset; teacher competence; teacher importance; teacher incompetence.

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