Education reforms and dealing with charismatic teachers

Charismatic author and speaker Joyce Meyer once said, “Teachers can change lives with the right mix of chalk and challenges”. She wasn’t talking about reforms in education.
The buzz word in Sri Lanka’s education these days is ‘reforms’. And Prime Minister Harini Amarasuriya, who is also the Minister of Education, Higher Education and Vocational Training has vowed to implement changes to education by the year 2026. These reforms would be made under five main pillars with the introduction of a new syllabus taking prominence. The other plans on the agenda are developing human resources and infrastructure, educating the public and conducting proper assessments and evaluations. 
Amarasuriya has reiterated the importance of giving every child a quality education. She also wants a unified education system under a common examination framework. If this is done, then it isn’t hard to convince parents from rural schools that the year five scholarship exam should be scrapped. 
Whatever advances made using technology in classrooms and teaching methods (gained through teacher-training workshops), parents still have to depend on tuition classes to ensure that their children get ‘A passes’ at exams. The bottom line to this tuition issue is that tuition masters are serious about their businesses whereas most fulltime teachers are offering their services for the sake of being employed. 

There is a school of thought that school teachers must be paid attractive salaries. Then only you’ll see teachers with exceptional skills showing an interest to join the staff of academic institutions and teach from 7.30 am to 1.30 pm. Otherwise, skilled teachers prefer to engage in the tuition industry with the freedom they enjoy, allowing them to mint money like doctors, lawyers and engineers. In tuition classes every student is a walking advertisement; hence tuition masters raise the level of performance of every student using study packs and giving individual attention. Present-day school teachers must also take a cue from tuition masters to raise the capacity of students at school. 
Another point underscored in newspaper write-ups about education reforms is the necessity to have a quality teacher-student relationship. Teaching methods and the approach to a lesson by the teacher must be lively. Teachers must have a knack for acting or performing while on their feet and in the classroom. If a teacher takes the right approach to teaching a lesson, there’ll never be a dull moment in the classroom. 
It is in this backdrop that Member of Parliament V.Radhakrishnan has proposed the idea of bringing down teachers from India to teach in the Tamil medium in schools in the plantation sector. According to newspaper reports, this proposal was made in parliament in the past, but it attracted opposition from the JVP. Radhakrishnan has said that he has hopes that the present regime will implement this idea. 
Why are we looking at tuition classes and teachers from India to solve the crisis associated with students and existing within the school? May be Premier Amarasuriya has the foresight to make classroom sessions productive and interesting and for that she is proposing all these changes now. 

She has also been quoted in the media saying that teaching is not merely a profession, but a noble vocation. It is a noble vocation inside classrooms, but teachers inside schools are not hero-worshipped like inside tuition classes. Teachers who conduct sessions inside classrooms don’t need a big gab, guts and sticky glue (to paste posters like tuition masters do) to engage in this profession of dispensing knowledge. But efforts made to initiate reforms in school education can be dwarfed when state authorities don’t negotiate the challenge coming from advertising campaigns run by tuition masters; especially in towns like Gampaha and Kurunegala. Some years ago, this writer passing through Gampaha town saw a ten-foot cut-out of a gladiator like figure installed in the centre of the town bearing the words ‘Come in groups or as individuals, your challenge is accepted’. This was an advertisement for an A Level Logic class. State reforms to education are most welcome, but government officials must take note that private tuition masters are at present doing a better job at teaching compared to fulltime school teachers.