Testing, testing, 1 2 3: the drive for more tests and school league tables is sweeping the world. Education is being turned into an industry …

New Internationalist, August, 1999

This empowerment of teachers is necessary not just in India but all over the world. The traditional image of the teacher as a wise and respected figure in the community, bearing the torch of learning to the next generation, seems sadly inappropriate given the diminished status and demoralized state of the teaching profession worldwide. In the early 1990s the Second ILO Meeting on the Conditions of Work of Teachers concluded that the situation of teachers had reached `an intolerably low point' - their working conditions were being drastically eroded and an exodus of qualified and experienced teachers was resulting. (4)

`Teachers have seen a massive decline in their status,' says Mary Hatwood Futrell, President of the umbrella teacher union Education International. `They are asked to work long hours for a salary that has rarely kept pace with inflation; they often work with only a few materials of very poor quality... and more and more time is spent on needless administration brought about by constantly changing government policies.' (5)

Teachers, like children, have become subject to the productivist view of education which runs the risk of seeing teachers as just another `input', not quite as costly as a classroom but much more costly than a textbook.

But schools are not factories whose success is measured in the number of children churned out at the end. Education's success can only be gauged according to what children have learned, in the skills, lively minds and values they carry with them into life beyond school. The teacher is no less vital to that learning experience than she or he has ever been. The modern world may be bursting at the seams with information but: `You need a teacher to sort out the information from the data that surrounds the student; you need a good teacher to sort out the knowledge from the information; you need an excellent teacher to sort out the wisdom from the knowledge.' (6)

Tony Eaude, the local headteacher I mentioned earlier, put it similarly in a speech to colleagues when he left the job last year, urging them not to lose sight of what matters amid the onslaught of Education as Production Line. `I was told a story many years ago by a headteacher from Kenya. He was now head of the school where he had learnt as a young boy. The children were often taught outside, keeping out of the heat in the shade of great trees. When he was young, like so many children, he had planted seeds; returning 50 years later, he realized that he had planted not only trees, but classrooms for the future.

`As you plant, never plant only one tree. Plant three - one for shade, one for fruit, and one for beauty.'

(1) Vincent Greaney and Thomas Kellaghan, Monitoring the Learning Outcomes of Education Systems, World Bank 1996.

(2) Quoted in David Glovin, `Welcome to Measurement Inc', Rethinking Schools, Spring 1999.

(3) Bill Bigelow, `Tests from Hell', Rethinking Schools, Spring 1999.

(4) Cited in The Learning of Those Who Teach: Towards a New Paradigm of Teacher Education, UNICEF/UNESCO.