primary school teachers the twists and turns of everyday practice

Version 20 Oct 08, edited final
VI
Is there a way out?
Our objective in writing this booklet was to explore the ways in which teachers’
practice is shaped by conditions on the ground. The underlying issue, of course,
relates to why, despite enormous increases in budget outlays and a host of
government initiatives, learning outcomes in our primary schools continue to be so
poor.
We begin this final chapter by presenting five key conclusions that emerged from
this exploration, drawing both from our own fieldwork and from available literature
on the subject. We then provide a brief overview of what a comprehensive approach
to teacher development should encompass, again drawing from available literature
on the subject. And finally, we discuss some possible ways forward.
Five key conclusions
We began this booklet by summarising three possible ways of viewing the ‘teacher
problem’. Simply put, these consist of: blame the teachers, who are irresponsible and
lazy. Blame the larger political and administrative environment which forces
teachers to prioritise non-academic tasks over teaching. Or blame the education subsystems
that select, train and support teachers for not providing them with either
opportunity or incentive to engage with what it means to teach well.
As the foregoing chapters of this booklet have demonstrated the diagnosis is far from
simple. But we believe that while there will always be some lazy teachers and
potential avenues for corruption, the main responsibility for this massive failure lies
with the education system itself. Here are the reasons why.
Conclusion 1. Teaching positions are in great demand all over the country. But
despite the plentiful supply of teacher candidates, little effort goes into either
selecting those who show talent for and interest in teaching, or adequately
preparing those selected to engage with educational processes in any meaningful
way.
We have seen earlier in this booklet that entry-level requirements are very low for
primary school teachers. Typically a low pass percentage in the Class 12 or even
Class 10 examination is all that is needed. Pre-service training programmes, where
these are required for appointment to teaching positions, are typically designed on
the assumption that this level of schooling provides an adequate content base for
teaching in primary schools, although this assumption has been shown by many
studies to be untrue, particularly at the upper primary level. If we want children to
learn, then education policy makers must address this issue; it will not go away by
itself. If large numbers of teachers themselves are unable to grasp primary school
content, they obviously cannot teach it to others.
Nor, as we saw in Malati’s experience, do pre-service training programmes provide
the skills that future teachers need in order to address learners’ needs in diverse
contexts. These courses assume that teachers will have a homogenous community of
learners, adequate infrastructure and TLM and the luxury of teaching a single class
at a time. The real conditions that prevail in most government primary schools across
the country are never addressed; thus teacher candidates spend a year or two
receiving and being tested on a vast amount of theoretical knowledge that is of little
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